Cloud Companion

photography by Michelle Bluhm

Today, we'll start with just a short meditation. Get comfortable and feel the seat under you, the floor, the air on your face. Be aware of your breath. All the sounds around you, just notice them. Everything that arises, a sound or sensation – just let it arise and then pass away. Don’t grab hold of it. Don’t try to push it away. There’s pain in your body, just notice that. Allow it, don’t get upset – it’s not going to keep you from anything. Thoughts about the past or future, just notice them. Just allow your awareness to expand.

Ram Dass, 1985

Each sentence presents an added weight of existence, spoken with a chosen conscientiousness that methodically leads a group meditation towards a state of hyperawareness. The tape flows in and out of silence with faint static, where the sniffles and grunts of settling audience members blur into the familiar hum of aged recordings. The voice of renowned spiritual guide Ram Dass acts as the pilot, steering minds towards the notion of acknowledgement over fixation. As the mindfulness of the present begins to expand, Ram Dass can be imagined at the edge, weaving his threads of wisdom. Each strand acts as a guide through the disillusion of self, evoking a reverence in the world’s ancient coexistence of being.

A similar sanctity for wholeness can be glimpsed in everyday life – a simple acknowledgement while reading a book, walking to the mailbox, or cooking dinner. However, the most relatable understanding of this concept can best be described as the aimless warmth of wonder one is bound to experience at a live show. 

There is a moment in the night where the live music gives way to an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Taking the precious time to soak in the surrounding people and sounds, marveling at the unification. The technicolor lights dance over the faces of strangers, all of them beaming with awe at the stage before them. Every individual goal interlaced into a singular event, indirectly connecting with those around through appreciation of shared interests. Realizing that the idea of being present in that moment, becoming a part of a singular event that cannot be replicated, is nothing short of a miracle in the universe.

This proverbial moment of clarity came to me one night in March, standing slack-jawed at my first live performance of Austin-based band, Cloud Companion. Vague wisps of spiced incense smoke lazily hung in the air around the six-piece tightly organized on the inside stage of Hotel Vegas. A small altar with said incense adorned the lower octaves of a keyboard placed front and center, manned by conceptual musician Aaron Chavez.

“Before we begin, I’d like to take a moment to breathe together,” Chavez began, with eyes closed and hand over the heart. 

Everyone on and off stage followed suit, the venue lulled into a rare moment of silence before the first note rang out. Before I knew it, the show was done and something within me was shifted 

Later on that night, I realized that what I witnessed was an instance of pure human connection wedged into the repetitive silhouette of musical performance, creating a truly irreplicable experience. 

Embrace everything you hear or feel or think. Just, ‘And that, too. Yes, and that, too.’ Just keep seeing there is space around each thing. See that your awareness is the space in which all of the thoughts and all of the sensations are appearing and disappearing – as if your awareness were the sky and your thoughts and sensations are the clouds coming, passing through, disappearing into the far horizon. 

Michelle & Bardo

Through various teachings and meditation practices, Ram Dass refers to awareness as the Nameless Sky – vast and open, it remains unchanged. The clouds within the sky are the content of that awareness. Perceptions, feelings and thoughts traverse the boundlessness in a constant state of transformation.

This conceptual dialogue was the inspiration behind Cloud Companion’s first show at an art festival in Marfa, which featured songs and poetry written by Chavez. 

“The first Cloud Companion show was actually a puppet show,” Chavez revealed. “It was a conversation between some sock puppet Cloud Companion and the Nameless Sky. It was mainly poetry I had written, putting it together in the guise of a conversation – playing songs in between that were related to the flow of what’s going on.”

Chavez had been keeping an extensive log of voice recordings with various piano melodies and poetry since his first cellphone in 7th grade (an Alltel Scoop, if you were curious). His experiences and surroundings present the tools in which Chavez uses to frame his art, drawing upon them for inspiration.

Growing up in a Christian household with a pastor father, Chavez is no stranger to faith, community, and tradition. With inexplicable questions about the powers that play remaining unavoidable. He began a years-long deconstruction of his religious background and building anew through his own exploration of the world. 

Chavez discovered an ancient peace in Ram Dass guided meditations, in the psychedelic art of Alex Grey, in the natural interconnected processes of the world. He began incorporating this growth into his day-to-day life, allowing it to be used as fuel for his then solo project.

As Chavez went down this path of natural discovery, so did his music and performance. 

“Part of why it took so long to introduce this project to the world is that I felt very vulnerable with it, sharing my heart in this way,” Chavez confessed. “More than other projects that I’m involved in, this project is really an expression of my spirituality. It felt natural to do things like make an altar or ground us into the space, because that’s the place where the songwriting comes from, where the inspiration comes from. We’re trying to tap into the quality of awareness in the performance being the same quality of awareness that went into the writing of it.”

Feel that this awareness has qualities to it that you can notice at this stage. You can notice spaciousness. Notice spaciousness. Feel the spaciousness that expands into this whole theater, so that really there is one awareness and there are all these different forms through which it is passing. We’re all right here.

The transformation of his art began to run parallel to his revelations in life. While his music and lyrics mainly speak within his work, Chavez believes that the performance and space in which those things are presented adds a whole new layer of complexity. Stage performances started to incorporate various mentally-stimulating elements, fostering a playful but present ambience. 

There is an often untapped potential in altering the atmosphere of a venue for a show. Many unintentionally take the shape of some bare-boned, skeletal outline of performance, run into the ground through years of repetition and assuming that’s just how it should be.

Chavez, on the other hand, decided that the lack of stage action gave him free reign to make the space his own, effectively fostering an environment that best portrays his music. For thirty minutes to an hour, Chavez takes the time to heighten the audience’s quality of awareness and bring them to the present moment, to his music. 

This is why he calls his performance an “interactive cosmic experience.”

“It’s a music venue. I’m not trying to turn that music venue into a yoga studio,” Chavez stated. “But when you’re performing, there’s an aspect of it where you’re transforming the space. It’s not trying to turn the music venue into something else, but it’s reframing and appreciating that we’re in a music venue. Together.”

Just as the space of performance is changed, so is the space within the band. A once-solo project, born from a personal and expressive place in Chavez’s heart, began exhibiting a sort of mimesis – falling subject to the transformative nature in Chavez’s recent life and imitating that change.

Chavez first brought on drummer Trey Rosenkampff at the start of 2023. It was the first time Chavez played a Cloud Companion show without backing tracks, preferring what a live drummer has to provide. After their first show together, Rosenkampff offered up his friend Genesis Green to Chavez, saying she had free time and a bass. The very next show, Chavez, Rosenkampff and Green took the stage in a triad of musicality.

After a Cloud Companion show on the indoor stage at Mohawk, Chavez met artist Monica Bushong and enlisted them to be the auxiliary percussionist – glockenspiel, bubbles and uncannily accurate bird noises included. The next show and a couple thereafter presented the four-person set-up onstage before Chavez brought on Ateen Savadkoohi on guitar and Connor McCampbell on additional synths, both of whom he already performs with in Flyer Club and TC Superstar.

Cloud Companion became the six-piece band it is now in the span of two months during 2023, each musician adding their own flavor to Chavez’s passionate arrangements. Most importantly of all, they understand the weight of this project’s importance for Chavez.

And now another quality of the spaciousness: equanimity. Just see that no matter how agitated you are, that no matter how frightened you are, no matter how despairing or aggravated or doubting or confused – see that also in you is this place behind it which has equanimity, which is equanimous. It doesn’t make your depression or despair or confusion or doubt or agitation any less. But it says, ‘Also here is equanimity.’ There is a place in me that always is at peace if I will merely acknowledge it. Even the most frightening moments – tiny thread, though it might be – it’s always right here.

Cloud Companion released its first full-length album in 2023 called Ordinary Time. The album comprises 13 tracks, five of which were released as singles beforehand. All of the composition, songwriting and recording was done by Chavez before the full band materialized.

Recording the album unlocked something within Chavez that remains to this day. His room was converted into a tea room/recording studio with more pianos than chairs, a manual Murphy-style mattress leaned against the wall with a tapestry draped over it – which is where it stays since Chavez likes to sleep on the same mat he takes when going on tour. 

Going through this new experience, Chavez was able to learn and evolve in his process while creating new memories with friends and collaborators along the way. 

“One of my favorite parts of recording the album was towards the end when I had this idea for the Ordinary Orchestra,” Chavez remembered fondly. “I had a bunch of friends come over, and we all sat around playing toy instruments and singing, ‘Oh yeah!’ We only had four headphones and there were way more than four people here, so the majority couldn’t hear the song. It was a little chaotic, but it was the spirit that mattered.”

In the production of Ordinary Time, Chavez found a mentor in Connor “Canevil” McCampbell – frontman for TC Superstar, the daredevil of Flyer Club and synths in Cloud Companion. McCampbell guided Chavez through the process of recording, software and arrangement, opening new possibilities for layers of instruments to coincide within one track. Being predominantly a piano player, Chavez learned to reframe the notes in order to stack them upon one another.

“What I’m playing on the left hand, maybe the keyboard doesn’t play that at all. Maybe it’s bass or a guitar part,” Chavez explained. “Or maybe this other thing that I’m playing up here that’s feeling very fluttery – maybe the keyboard isn’t that, either.”

McCampbell also held Chavez accountable for the work he wanted to create, teaching Chavez the importance of immediate determination.

“One of the most helpful things I learned from Connor was getting things into the recording software as the idea is being developed,” Chavez revealed. “I get stuck in the voice memo world, but I start to spin my tires just imagining. Connor writes into the software. It’s the difference between touching the clay and drawing a picture or thinking about how you want to touch the clay.”

The foundation of Cloud Companion is an eclectic ensemble of sonically-layered, atmospheric sound, whose melodies serve as a beautiful accompaniment to equally profound lyrics on interconnectedness, cosmic perspective and the miracle of simply being ‘here.’ However, the conceptual planning for this album was just as important to Chavez as the composition.

The album begins with the sound of a ceramic dish and the iconic beep of a microwave, followed by a low, “Ooohh yeeeaaaah.” Various other chords of oh-yeahs hang in the ether of the first, building up to a cacophony of harmonies reminiscent of a church choir. 

This, of course, is OHYEAH – a track that has been with Chavez since 2018. 

“It conjured up this vision of a dollhouse – Earth, cracked open like a dollhouse. There’s different layers, like the stratosphere, biosphere, mantle and all that. Just everything,” Chavez elaborated. “The past, future, present – all overlaid on top, and you see the big activity of mountains forming and collapsing, cities. It’s all happening simultaneously.”

In the making of the song, Chavez learned about deep time and geologic processes. The intersectionality of these concepts and OHYEAH allowed Chavez to digest bewildering, complicated knowledge in a way that was personalized to his heart and mind.

“I think of OHYEAH as the microwave meal version of ohm,” Chavez stated, making a connection between the familiar phrase and the long-established hum of the universe. 

Placing this song at the beginning was just as strategic for Chavez as it was artistic, believing that it presented the perfect backdrop for the album’s story. To Chavez, this first track served as a reminder of the wonder in everything, the big-picture beauty of the world – as long as the time is taken to appreciate it.

At the end of the song, wind chimes begin to twinkle through the low hum before fully overtaking the track. A woman speaks in Spanish before morphing into the next track, Ordinary Time.

“It’s a recording of my grandmother on the porch saying, ‘Stand over there in the shadow,’” Chavez divulged. “For me, OHYEAH is saying, ‘Here is the vast everything. No time, all of time, it’s beyond time.’ Then hearing my grandmother’s voice and the wind chimes, now we’re going into a specific timeline, an incarnation, a life. So it’s cosmic and then boom! Ordinary Time.”

The next track is obviously Ordinary Time (my personal favorite), effectively turning the album from the cosmic perspective to the human perspective. Even in narrowing the storyline of the album, Chavez expanded the relatability of the point of view. 

Running (Out-of-Time) and Same Picture go hand-in-hand for Chavez, presenting the listener with the same situation in an emotional dichotomy.

“Ordinary Time, as a song, feels almost like a thesis for the album,” Chavez detailed. “Same Picture is a montage of waking up every day. Running (Out-Of-Time) is that same montage, just turning up the dial a bit. It has anxiety baked into it.”

One thematic element that is noticeable throughout the entire album is an active reframing of the seemingly anticlimactic cyclicism of everyday life. Waking up, doing things and falling asleep only to do it all over again the next day, and the next day, and the next. What can seem like an inescapable cycle, Chavez’s lyrics rephrase it to show the beauty and awe of it all.

“I see this album as an expression of my appreciation and wonder, an invitation to others to appreciate this experience. Literally any moment, you can remember that one, it’s incredible that anything exists. And two, it’s incredible that there’s a quality of something that can witness that. It’s the most simple but profound thing to me.”

The next song is Becoming With, which feels like a long, drawn-out outro. 

However, like the tracklist, this song is often placed in the middle of the set. During the live performance, as the music swells and fades together, chimes and birdsong can be heard from Monica Bushong. The sounds evolve as others on the stage and in the audience contribute, from farm animals to planes overhead. In a ritualistic sense, this song breaks the groove of the set to bring the audience back to the present moment while strengthening the sense of community through its interactive nature. 

Like many of the other songs on the album, the next track – Can U Hear Me – was based on Chavez’s personal experiences and surroundings as an outlet to convey more vulnerable emotions. Can U Hear Me was written about Chavez’s roommate at the time, a situation between friends that grew to experience friction and confusion. It explores the intimacy of sharing a space with someone and the tension that arises when you bump into them, having nowhere to hide because you’re already home.

The next song of note is Diana, which features the first guitar melody Chavez had ever written. Diana is a perfect example of how some of these songs have gone through a years-long metamorphosis to be what they are today. According to Chavez, songs like Diana have undergone so many revisions, it could have its own album.

This is where the album seems to shift. The latter half feels like a turning point, an end to a day. We’ve been playing outside all day, now it’s time to wind down in the backyard. Chavez views the split of the album as two conceptual versions of his music: the sky songs and the cloud songs. 

“The first part of the album is the cloud songs. Those are the activity, the hustle and bustle, the storyline, the anxieties and joys,” Chavez emphasized. “The second half – the sky songs – represent the spacious awareness that all that manifests within. Hanging out in the backyard and enjoying looking at the sky feels like a representation of that spacious awareness.”

All My Friends was written by Chavez in 2017 while he was in Spain. The foundation of the song actually came from another project at the time: a Christmas album by the band RC Cat, in which Santa Claus is painted to be God. (It’s on Bandcamp, you will not regret it.)

The next song, Painting with Sunlight, contains beautiful lyrics inspired by cyanotype frustrations. It begins with:

I’ve been painting with sunlight for years,

And I still don’t know what I’m doing

Most of the time

Painting with sunlight is a tricky thing

Oh, that sun has a mind of her own

Painting with Sunlight, Blue Blue Blue Blue and There Is Only Sky presented as consecutive tracks in the album gave Chavez the opportunity to make the Nameless Sky its own entity in his work. While Painting with Sunlight plays the introductory role by making the sky itself the subject of the song, the other two dive into more intense elements.

“In Blue Blue Blue Blue, there is a deepening of what the sky represents – but it still feels more observational, like the sky is over there,” Chavez elaborated. “In There Is Only Sky, there’s a shift in perspective in which there is only sky. It’s shifting from the sky is just above, to the sky is all around, to there is nothing but sky. Moving from feeling like something separate within this big thing to identification as the entire thing.

“From one perspective, we’re so small and so insignificant. This is such a vast stage and we’re all little pieces of dust on it,” he continued. “But also, we are the whole thing. It is us.”

Family (Re)union takes on the conclusion to the sky songs, consisting of a fluttery, wind chime-esque piano melody as the music inflates. Chavez sings to open your eyes and hands, calling the listener back into the world and transitioning to the final song on the tracklist.

Rich World brings the album full circle, back into the “cloud space,” as Chavez called it. This song presents an outward focus – the current context in which we live and the poignancy that comes with it. At the same time, it appreciates the moments of clarity and beauty. Rich World presents the striking polarity of our overall situation and the moments of wonder that can be found in the cracks, having spaciousness for the coexistence of both.

“What is this context that we live within? What are my own internal things that I’m projecting onto the world?” Chavez asked. “How can we make something meaningful out of it all?”

Through Ordinary Time as a whole, Chavez takes the listener on a journey through his spirituality. The overlapping concepts of the album draw to a conclusion, intentionally sending listeners back out into their own real worlds with a rejuvenated sense of appreciation and community. 

See how this awareness also has the quality of love, an appreciation of forms. Bring before your mind’s eye somebody that you love and feel that place in your heart that opens, and how fortunate you are to have shared part of an incarnation with such a person – whether that person be in flesh or not. Now bring to mind an image of yourself standing before yourself, your separate self. See what happens to your heart then. Does it close down? Does it stay open? Do you have that same feeling of love and appreciation for the preciousness of yourself? Look more deeply. Part the veils and see your own beauty, your own precious is-ness. See that behind all of the dramas of that self that stands before you, there is, ‘I am.’

With the music completed and the band fully formed, the next point of focus for Chavez was stage performance and presentation. 

As discussed before, Chavez and his bandmates have begun to include a ritualistic aspect to their shows. Chavez builds the altar on his keyboard, lighting the incense. After everything is set up – but before a single note is played – Chavez invites the audience to join him in a breathing exercise.

“This project is ever-developing. It’s only been the last couple of months that we started doing the breathwork in order to tune into the space,” Chavez said. “It’s funny – a lot of the times I’m doing that, I’m shaking.”

While this newfound tradition is totally on brand for Cloud Companion, it’s also absolutely genius and the purest meaning of the word “human.” With something as simple as the encouragement to breathe in unison, Chavez creates a sense of togetherness with every friend and stranger in the room. Even people who have yet to hear a single song of Cloud Companion, who happened to walk into the right venue at the right time, feel included. A one-night exclusive relationship with the band, an event so peculiar and organic that it cannot be replicated ever again. 

In this, Cloud Companion actively creates an experiential singularity while allowing people to feel a part of the collective. 

With so many visions and ideas to make Cloud Companion shows more experiential for the audience, Chavez realized he could not take the task alone. 

In occupying his creative space, Chavez began working more closely and artistically with Monica Bushong and Michelle Bluhm – two creatives in Austin that share Chavez’s vision of spirituality and performance. In short, they play.

“The playfulness balances out the sacred,” Chavez revealed. “You can have fun in it, too. The playful aspect of it is just as potent of an expression of that as anything. That’s how I relate to Monica and Michelle so well.”

The night I met Monica and Michelle for their interviews was, coincidentally, also craft night. As I walked to the front door of the downtown Austin home, I could hear faint music with laughter bubbling through. Making my way to the backyard, I see Bushong and Chavez gazing above the Bluhm standing before them – only to see the stick-figure skeleton of a giant puppet.

That’s Bardo, the dream wizard.

Monica Bushong was the first to meet Chavez and interact with Cloud Companion. An Austin native, Bushong feels the weight of responsibility in representing her community.

“I wanted to make a point that we still exist here,” Bushong elaborated. “You can be here and be an artist and survive – even thrive. Unfortunately, our generation has to fight for existence, but it felt more important doing it here than anywhere else.”

Bushong is a visual artist under the name MINDSOUP (@minds0up on Instagram). Her multimedia art is based on clouds and the interpretations of them, as well as Bushong’s religious studies. The art is color-changing, making sunlight an active character in the pieces and solidifying Painting with Sunlight as Bushong’s favorite song off the album. 

They also have synesthesia, a condition in which one sense triggers another sense at the same time. For Bushong, having synesthesia has only deepened their already enigmatic relationship with their art. 

“It turned all my English papers into gorgeous paintings,” Bushong stated. “But I would have to work really hard for the words and the colors that I was seeing to create something beautiful on both ends. I also have spatial-sequence synesthesia, so I don’t really write my own music – it comes out as these abstract paintings. Those are my songs, my compositions.”

With all this in mind, it goes without saying that, to Bushong, Chavez was a kindred spirit.

“Aaron has so much music inside of him that we’re just trying to catch up,” Bushong said with admiration

Though they hail from a family of musicians, Bushong had not played in years – then one night, in the span of 20 minutes, had been enlisted in two separate bands. Not only does Bushong perform as the auxiliary percussionist for Cloud Companion, but they also play an integral role in the creative process and development.

Michelle Bluhm is also a part of this creative team, understanding Chavez’s message and its delivery.

Bluhm majored in Resource and Environmental Geography from Texas State, diving headfirst into an all-encompassing study of the Earth and its natural processes, the people on Earth and how they got where they are. Along with the management and threats to natural resources – all the things we learned in grade school, just on a more complex scale.

While what she learned was scientific in practice, Bluhm felt more connected to the poetry and beauty she waxed from the knowledge.

“I wasn’t excited to do anything else in school, but I really care about the environment. I want to figure out how this whole thing works because I live here, and I want to take care of it,” Bluhm explained. “I feel like that’s one thing me and Aaron and Monica connect on deeply is just how magically fascinating everything is around us – all the natural processes, everything from the macro to the micro.”

After Bluhm graduated college and ran the corporate schtick for a while, she realized that she wanted to do art. She chose a little bit of everything, learning any DIY or reused material craft she could possibly sell. 

After becoming friends, Bluhm attended Bushong’s first performance with Cloud Companion at Hole in the Wall. Not only was she beside herself with the musicality of the then four-person band onstage, but she remembered the way Chavez existed on the stage, beaming the way he did in his sparkly blue cardigan. Sentimentally, Diana is her favorite song off the album.

Through her interests, studies and overall appreciation for her church in nature, Bluhm, Bushong and Chavez became fast colleagues and even faster friends.

“I want to create art that makes people feel something, helps people find a sense of reverence, a sense of appreciation,” Bluhm explained. “It makes us feel a sense of disillusion that makes us feel more connected to each other. Makes us happier, kinder people, shakes us from our slumber. It’s something I love that Aaron wants to do, too.”

Bushong and Bluhm have experience working on set designs together, making them the perfect team to help Chavez increase the experiential aspect of Cloud Companion shows. As shows start to bleed into one another with similar structure, this creative collective aims to make their show more immersive, more community-based, more…well…fun.

“We talk about wanting to make art that kind of taps on the glass a bit, just does things that are kind of unexpected – keeps people on their toes, entertains them,” Bluhm highlighted. “Music is not just about playing things out to people. I want to have an experience.”

Hence, Bardo the dream wizard and a slew of other ideas to make their shows stand out, all in due time.

Recognize your own higher self, and recognize the way it has come into form and appreciate the perfection of the creation. See that you are the creator and the created. You are the lawful form unfolding, and you are that which is behind the law. You are one of the many, and you are the one. Can you not love that being that stands before you? Can you not allow it to be just as it is and recognize the possibility that it is not an error?

The future of Cloud Companion has gotten brighter with the addition of a full band and creative support, but the road ahead is still long for Chavez.

While making music is the main focus as of now, Chavez hopes to build the Cloud Companion brand into an artist collective – publishing small books and zines, making DIY merch and possibly even combining concerts with art workshops.  In due time, the music will just become one of many outlets.

“It’s easiest to build this stuff around the music because it already exists, and it’s something that I’ve been working on for years,” Chavez pointed out. “Long term, I’d like the other aspects to be just as robust as the music, for them to feed into each other as one – like an ecosystem, a garden of different things. Right now, the music is the first little shoot.”

Much like an actual cloud floating across the sky, Cloud Companion continues to evolve as an ever-transformative entity in the Austin music scene, spreading a message that took years for Chavez to translate for himself.

“I see this as an expression of my appreciation and wonder, an invitation to others to appreciate this experience. Literally any moment, you can remember that one, it’s incredible that anything exists. And two, it’s incredible that there’s a quality of something that can witness that. It’s the most simple but profound thing to me.”

If you look at the sky long enough, it will start to form a grainy static. This is actually you seeing your own white blood cells in your eyes, squished together to make the endless blue appear fuzzy. This phenomenon is more colloquially known as blue sky sprites. 

Legend has it that if you keep looking, Aaron Chavez will appear with a cup of hot tea waiting for you, ready to discuss this crazy thing we call life.

Keep up-to-date with the band and future events and shows coming up by following their Instagram page (@cloud.companion). Listen to their latest album, Ordinary Time, on all streaming platforms. Support local art, and namaste.

May each of us become such clear and pure instruments of light, of love, of presence, of clarity, of equanimity. That the light of spirit pours through our every cell, and everybody we meet is touched by living spirit – no matter how we meet them, in whatever role in life. Then, where we are, everywhere we look we see flowers blooming. It’s what the sun sees when it looks down from above. What grace, what incredible grace.