As soon as we saw the gig cancellations and the walls start to form around us, we decided that we had to find our way around it, or find our way under it, or just find a way to get through it. We instantly started throwing around ideas for this album release show, and I threw out the idea of doing a livestream of a performance in an empty venue.
We got on the phone with tons of people, and let them all know what we were thinking. [Code Orange’s label] Roadrunner reached out, and I reached out to my friend Sunny [Singh, videographer and cinematographer], who runs Hate5Six, as well as other people from the hardcore scene, and our guy Sam Jiminez, who’s kind of like our production manager – he knows so much about production and has been helping us build our whole light show, and bringing to life everything that we’ve been dreaming up. We were trying to get everything done for as little resources as possible, and Sam’s great at making sure that we can do what we want to do for as little as possible, because we don’t have that much. We just started scrambling and talking to everyone, and they all really came together. The community that we’re from – the hardcore community – was a huge part of helping us with Twitch, and the staff were also very helpful, too.
One thing that was very beneficial to us was the fact that we do all our own content, and we’re super-involved in making sure that we get the best price for production. So the year that had been spent on all our video content really paid off. Just that creativity, and having people like Sunny who put in the work so we could get this all going, really made something special happen. Having our roots in hardcore helped us do that all. We want to show people that you don’t have to be the biggest band in the world to do this. We actually got really lucky in a lot of ways, because we were putting everything that we had into this one show right at the beginning [of the cycle for Underneath], so it all turned out perfectly in that sense. But without that, you can still do things, different things. You can do things in your bedroom, and just be creative, and use the platforms that are available in a positive way until we can all get back and connected with each other.