Thao

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The 2012 Line-up

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Since last playing Noise Pop in 2010 with Mirah, a celebrated collaboration that resulted in a full tour and an album, Thao has been extremely busy, both musically and politically.

She has teamed up with Air Traffic Control, an organization that engages musicians with social and political issues, to get involved in community activist work. For example, Thao and Mirah worked with ATC to add a $1 surcharge to tickets on their tour, and saw that pro- ceeds went to domestic violence shelters and sexual abuse counseling programs in each of the towns they played. “I think in this line of work you need something beyond yourself to keep you going because it’s such a bizarre thing to do,” she says. “People show up for you and they clap. That’s not realistic.”

Through ATC, Thao also linked up with Future of Music Coalition, a DC-based lobbying group whose mission, as Thao explains it, is to “make sure that musicians have a level playing field and people can make music and get paid in the ever changing digital world.”

Thao visited Washington on behalf of the organization last year where she met with staffers for different members of Congress, a bipartisan congressional arts committee, and the FCC. Thao sees her activist work as an extension of her job as an artist. She believes, “If we’re lucky enough, we can get at people in different ways that’s less dry, and people can become interested and involved more easily.”

At the request of Dave Eggers, Thao scored her first film, the 2011 documentary “American Teacher,” produced by the Teacher’s Salary Project. “I treated every section or scene as a little song, but there are no vocals, so you have to tap into the emotions of the scene,” says Thao. While she waits for her next opportunity to score a film, she’s live-scoring NPR’s Radiolab podcast tour once a month and writing a new album. As for taking on such a wide variety of projects, she says, “I didn’t intend it to be that way, but I find it to be a lot more rewarding and engaging. And as long as I’m lucky enough that people keep asking me to be involved, I’ll totally be involved and grateful for the opportunity.”

JESS HEMERLY

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