Roar Shack Live!: Bucket List presents "Achievement!"

Achievement is a continuous, 50-minute piece made up of 13 crossfaded musical modules, each designed by Bucket List’s alter ego—"The Achievement Institute." Performed in the round, some traditional seating will be available, but listeners are also encouraged to take in the soothing tones on their own yoga mat and pillow. 

Each musical module is scientistically engineered and clinically tested to advance the audience’s achievement in various domains:

Achievement I: Enhance REM Sleep

Achievement II: Improve SAT Exam Performance

Achievement III: Facilitate a Successful First Date

Achievement IV: Pass a Breathalyzer Test

Achievement V: Submit an Effective Insurance Claim

Achievement VI: Select Cryptocurrency Investments

Achievement VII: Perform Skillfully in Upcoming Congressional Testimony

Achievement VIII: Excel as an Online Influencer

Achievement IX: Recover from an Episode of Social Cancelation

Achievement X: Microdose Lucratively; Invent Algorithm that Will Destroy Democracy

Achievement XI: Apply for a Mortgage and Research the Best Infant Car Seats

Achievement XII: Boost Shareholder Value for Muzak

Achievement XIII: Efficaciously Introduce Fetus to the Genius of Mozart

The concert will begin with a lecture that explains the Achievement Institute’s proprietary methods, and offer ground floor investment opportunities for those billionaire venture capitalists in attendance. (Investment is optional. But, along with your pillow and yoga mat, bring your checkbook.)

Please join us for this exciting celebration of the morally unassailable record of neoliberal achievement!

Bucket List

Bucket List is a band conceived by The Living Earth Show—the San Francisco–based experimental duo of Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson—in collaboration with composer and creative catalyst Mark Applebaum.

For more than a decade, The Living Earth Show has sought to challenge and expand the traditional composer–performer model in contemporary music. Their partnership with Applebaum represents the most radical iteration of that philosophy to date. Rather than commissioning a single piece, Andrews and Meyerson invited Applebaum—whose work has profoundly shaped their artistic outlook—to form a band with them, developing a shared language through improvisation, experimentation, and collective composition.

Applebaum has long been a towering influence on The Living Earth Show’s practice: his irreverent virtuosity, conceptual rigor, and playfully subversive approach to music have deeply informed the duo’s aesthetic since Meyerson studied with him as an undergraduate. Bucket List is both a tribute to that lineage and a reimagining of it—a living, evolving collaboration that resists hierarchy and celebrates process over product.

The trio’s repertoire spans new complexity, experimental electronics, minimalism, funk, and jazz, often interwoven with theatrical and video elements. In Bucket List, ludic whimsy and rigorous discipline coexist, yielding music that is as unpredictable as it is exacting—a testament to the creative chemistry between Applebaum and the ensemble he helped inspire.

Mark Applebaum (Keyboards, Guitars, Voice, Doodads)

Well, I’ll be, lemme tell ya ’bout this here feller, Mark Applebaum, Ph.D. — a right smart hombre over at Stanford University, callin’ himself the Edith & Leland Smith Professor o’ Composition. Ain’t no ordinary town fiddler neither, nosiree. This here Applebaum digs music like a prospector digs for gold in a dry riverbed, pan in one hand, pick in t’other, never knowin’ what shiny nugget he’ll strike next.

He’s done music fer all sorts o’ rigs — solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and them fancy electroacoustic doodads. Folks say his work’s traveled near ’bout everywhere: from the Yukon to Patagonia, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia… why, I reckon even Mars if’n he wanted! Commissions? Lordy, he’s had ’em from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Kronos Quartet, the Spoleto Festival, and a heap more, all lookin’ fer the glitter of somethin’ new.

But don’t think he’s panning for gold the normal way. No sir. He’s done music fer three conductors an’ no players, a concerto fer a florist, made instruments outta junk, scribbled scores on wristwatches, and even a 72-foot-long graphic score that leaves museum folk scratchin’ their noggins like they found fool’s gold. He’ll wrangle silence, chaos, an’ obsessive page-turnin’ into somethin’ that shines like pure gold dust in the sun.

He plays jazz like a river rattlin’ over rocks, builds sound-sculptures outta scrap and busted gizmos, and got props from the American Academy o’ Arts & Letters. Over at Stanford, he founded [sic] — the Stanford Improvisation Collective, runnin’ it like a claim he stakes every day at high noon. Served on boards too, Other Minds, Carleton College, all the while keepin’ his pan full o’ nuggets of sound.

So if yer hankerin’ fer music with the glint o’ invention, the grit o’ the earth, an’ the thrill o’ the hunt, keep yer eyes peeled fer Mark Applebaum, Ph.D. — he’s out there sluicin’ the river of sound, and sometimes, if yer lucky, you’ll strike a nugget that’ll make yer heart sing.