Step into Marmoset’s Artist Residency House

Where creating your next big album and brushing your teeth can be done under the same roof

One of the biggest challenges today’s contemporary artist will face is finding the energy to create the actual art. Even a great artist with a wild imagination and equipped with a rounded set of skills must carve out space and time to translate those floating ideas into tangible creations.

A community of musicians, Marmoset is no stranger to the elusive starting point of the creative process. So to better understand this hurdle, we connected with our artists to identify where these interferences arise and how they could possibly be remedied. Unsurprisingly, it all came down to simply too many distractions.

But the thing is, there’s no such thing as a simple, singular distraction — to be sidetracked means shifting away all of one’s attention and focus from where it ought to be channeled. It drains time, creative thought, resources and valuable energy. It’s the fast-track way to just giving up and resigning to an auto-response of ‘I’ll try being creative another day.’

As supporters and advocates for our artists, we sought solutions to remedy the plague of distraction. And so the Marmoset Artist Residency House was founded. Nestled in a popular Portland, Oregon neighborhood, the house has been referred to as something that “feels like home” by the music producers and musical artists who’ve frequented it. Half studio and half house, the space is spruced in stylish yet inviting decor — it’s a free-thinking bungalow haven for those needing to unplug from the hazardous world of distraction while ramping up their creative momentum.

The residency house marks another chapter in the Marmoset Original Music team’s collaborative efforts, connecting Marmoset artists and creative clients together. In a way, the house is a realized homebase, a commonplace for Marmoset’s collaborators — producers, touring artists, composers and bands — to merge as one inclusive music production team.

“It’s a full immersion, I mean the access here, the proximity of the house to the studio obviously feet away,” says Sarah Versprille of Pure Bathing Culture. “Also, the ability to cook meals and have downtime but also be so close to the studio, it’s great, you can really wake up in the morning and get right to work, go to bed late and wake up to do it all over again. I mean, it’s truly the dream.”

Marmoset collaborators, Versprille and bandmate Daniel Hindman of Pure Bathing Culture have partaken in Marmoset’s Artist Residency Program. In fall of 2019, the band sought to reinvent songs from previous albums (such as Night Pass), settling into the Marmoset artist residency to produce an acoustic version of their record.

“As someone who’s worked on a lot of records, the more I make records, the more I want to really immerse myself and claim some kind of spiritual ownership of the space,” says Hindman. “So I’m actually kind of trying to demystify the studio to the point that I can then make it mystical again. For me, I wanna get all over it and just be in it, and something about that is made much stronger by staying where you’re also working.”

Pure Bathing Culture’s acoustic release debuts on the Marmoset catalog of music in 2019, a testimony to the residency’s spirit of collaboration. The house and studio are a tangible marker for creative liberation, each artist fulfilling a unique purpose and goal. In the case of Pure Bathing Culture, it was to revisit a well-received album and offer a new interpretation to fans. For other artists and musicians to frequent the space, perhaps it will be energization and renewal, to find comfort in feeling sheltered from everyday distractions

“You’re really able to take the time and put all the time into while you’re here,” says Versprille. “And for us, for our process, distractions are really bad as I’m sure they are for most people. There are really no distractions here and that’s powerful for creation.”