The band tries to connect with its audience online while a man short.

As Jank Setup worked to connect to the Zoom platform, the awkwardness of a virtual performance revealed itself. “Can you hear us?” Luis Carlos Villaseñor typed into the chat, clad in a surgical mask. “Everyone’s muted but us, but I don’t know if our sound is working,” he said to his bandmates, who patiently awaited the start of their live-stream set. 

New Orleans-based rock band Jank Setup usually performs as a five-piece ensemble with vocalist Kentro, guitarist Villaseñor, drummer Ethan May, keyboardist Shout Young, and bassist Adam Samolsky. For Friday night’s performance, however, Samolsky was unable to be present and instead supported his bandmates via Zoom as a member of the audience. The band gathered in May’s wood-paneled living room, packed with instruments and amps. The laptop that they used to stream sat atop a music stand, bent at a ninety-degree angle, with the screen and webcam artfully tilted to fit them all in frame. As he thanked the audience for tuning in, Kentro acknowledged the hopeful sense of community that acts as a beacon of light in these dark times: “That’s why we’re here, to try to experience live music again.”

Friday night’s performance was part of “Semotopalooza,” a digital music and culture festival hosted by up-and-coming virtual learning platform Semoto. The festival, which featured a diverse lineup of music, yoga, meditation, and mixology, aptly reflects the mission of the company: to provide a digital learning network that allows individuals to develop professional-taught skills from the safety of their own homes. With a suggested donation of $3, the festival aimed to support artists affected by the pandemic and health care workers on the frontlines. As headliners, Jank Setup closed up the night with a 30-minute set featuring a mix of covers and originals, each song a distinctive concoction of jazz and funk that has become a Jank Setup signature.

Emerging from the bustling Uptown music scene that coalesces Tulane and Loyola University musicians and music-lovers, the band has grown exponentially over the past few years, graduating from house parties and neighborhood venues to sold-out shows with nationally-recognized artists. Their first three singles, released in 2019, have been enthusiastically received, with their most popular track “In Motion” boasting over 400,000 streams on Spotify. 

For viewers that were already familiar with Jank Setup, Friday night’s performance might have served as a comforting salute to a pre-pandemic reality. For individuals who were seeing the band for the first time, however, the digital medium simply could not transmit the same joy and excitement that characterizes their live shows. Furthermore, at-home livestreams pose unique challenges for smaller artists, as a result of makeshift setups. Nonetheless, the band made do in spite of these challenges, working with the limited resources they had to provide an engaging performance. 

The success of streaming counts and followers means little when playing to a laptop, however. The inorganic nature of a digitally streamed performance presents unique challenges to live music, an experience that largely depends on the atmosphere produced by the venue and crowd. Without the background chatter produced by an audience, the silences between songs can be louder.

The lively dynamic between the members of Jank Setup, however, more than compensated for the energy that a live audience might usually provide. Unable to interact with the virtual audience, they turned their attention to each other as they joked between songs. During these moments, the sincere friendships between the members of the band strengthened the feeling of community that the festival sought to produce. In a way, it was an homage to the band’s conception: a group of guys coming together to do something they loved.