Musician Lorrie Kountz and wife Laura Jansons make up the instrumental guitar fusion duo Whatismu.
The two musicians released their self-titled debut CD in 2015 and have embraced a sound that is a hybrid of Indian percussion, rock guitars and EBM synthesizers—think Anoushka Shankar meets Led Zeppelin. Kountz talked with Windy City Times about her musical history, what inspired the duo's name and why they got married in Canada.
Windy City Times: What inspired you to get into music and at what age did you embrace it?
Lorrie Kountz: I started at the age of 8. My first instrument was drums, but after two weeks of running home from school and playing drums non-stop without instructions, I came home from school and there were no more drums. My mom stuck a guitar in my hand and said, "We have lessons for you."
WCT: Was there a time when you thought of doing music long-term?
LK: It was probably at the age of 13 when I started my first young band and I started realizing that this is something that I want to do. I actually started teaching music at 14 to the neighborhood kids.
WCT: How did you meet Laura [Jansons], who is your wife and one-half of Whatismu?
LK: We met in October 2008 online at a spirituality meetup group. It's non-denominational; it's all faiths, including Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity, and we started dating soon after that.
WCT: When did you realize that she played guitar?
LK: She was self-taught and we clicked right away. We had a lot in common—one being music. She is a neuropsychologist and I work in behavioral health also because music by itself nowadays doesn't pay the bills and you need health insurance. We got married in April 2010 and we didn't really start playing together formally until 2014.
WCT: When you started playing with Laura in 2014, what style of music were you doing?
LK: I had nine CD releases from different bands prior to that. I played in bands that were rock, heavy metal and new wave and I got displaced with what types of music. In 2014 Laura and I talked and we said, "Why don't we—like an artist—throw paint on a mural. What if we took different genres and put them all together. So we started working with Indian percussion and Indian instruments, heavy guitars and electronic dance music and we started putting it all together and we liked what we were hearing. We wanted to do the whole album with just instrumentals—so no vocals. It was a nice personal challenge for me to play all the leads and sing them through the lead guitar work.
WCT: Your music has been described as a cross between Anouska Shankar and Led Zeppelin. Did it take a long time to develop that sound?
LK: Yes, it did. It took a lot of successes and failures. Since we both like the heavier type bands we wanted to have the heavy guitars like Zeppelin. But we both—not only adore Indian music and the food—wanted to mesh the tablas and everything with the hard guitars and see what happened.
WCT: The self-titled debut record for Whatismu came out in 2015 on both vinyl and CD?
LK: We recorded it in 2014 and the vinyl wasn't released until May 2015 because it took that long to actually press the vinyl.
WCT: The name Whatismu comes from your personal introduction to koan study. How did you get involved in that?
LK: I am a Zen Buddhist and in Zen Buddhism part of the curriculum can be koan's study. "What is mu" ( separate words ) is from a Buddhist koan. The purpose of a koan is to help you understand deeper what you're looking for. It is a key to enlightenment to end suffering. It's only one way to study and the main study is meditation and one-on-one with your teacher. The koan's are thrown in there to help you get more of an understanding about how to release suffering.
WCT: You got married to Laura in 2010 and the nuptials took place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Same-sex marriage became legal in Canada in 2005. Why did you choose to get married in Toronto?
LK: We'd been to Toronto and we thought that it was a beautiful city. Since [same-sex marriage] was not yet legal in Illinois, we wanted to go somewhere that we really felt good about. We were just treated so kind there and we just love the [Canadian] feel. And since then we have been back several times.
Whatismu will perform at Great Plains Zen Center Benefit, Countryside Church, 1025 N. Smith St., Palatine, on Saturday, Feb. 20, at 7 p.m. For ticket information, go to www.greatplainszen.org/benefit_concert .
