Phoenix Down RPG Bridges the Gap Between Live Music and Video Games

Every living thing has a beginning and an end. A phoenix may burn as bright as the sun, the sight of majestic wings filling the sky with flames burning orange and yellow hues, but every flame eventually burns out. 

A phoenix’s life ends in ashes, with a new one resurrecting from a pile of what is thought to be heatless gray ruins.

The term “Phoenix Down” comes from the Final Fantasy video game series. Typically in these games, you have a team that goes into combat, and if everyone goes down in the game, you have the option to use a Phoenix Down to bring players back to life.

That was the inspiration behind the name of alt-classical ensemble Phoenix Down RPG, launched by husband-and-wife Dylan Lloyd and Teil Taliesin. Playing a mix of classical, new music and geek chic, the group has gained in popularity this year hosting interactive events like Name That Tune and even live-scoring a Super Smash Bros. tournament at Camp North End. 

With a goal to make gaming and the live music experience more accessible, Phoenix Down RPG has in the past held regular events like Video Game Mixtape, Campfire Tales and Klezmertron, which all led to the Super Smash Ultimate Video Game tournament, during which the duo played the game’s music score live. 

Held in partnership with local game development organization Potions & Pixels, the first Melody & Mayhem took place at Camp North End on June 1. 

“It was really cool to see the players. They felt special, being on the big screen and having us play music,” Lloyd said. “Sometimes, in between rounds, they would ask us, ‘Can you play this or can you play that?’ It was just really cool to see how special they thought it was.” 

“It was just as special for us,” Taliesin added. 

On June 20, the city announced that Phoenix Down RPG would receive a $38,252.50 grant from its Opportunity Fund, part of the city’s new Arts & Culture Plan, which will allow the group to expand its offerings even further through 10 Campfire Tales events. 

Phoenix Down RPG wants the event series to act as a portal that welcomes anyone and everyone to music and gaming. They want audiences to look on the stage and be able to see themselves doing the same thing. They want a community of creatives to be able to lean on one another.

“It’s a goal of ours to include as many different creators in the Charlotte area with this project. We want to bring in musicians, visual artists, actors, singers, dancers … you name it,” said Taliesin. 

“We want to help them not only create a connection with our audiences, but to show their creativity in a new light. They’re storytellers, and we want to have their storytelling through a lens of a community-based, collaborative effort.”

Rediscovering passion

Like a phoenix, a person’s spark — their fiery passion — can burn out. The things they love to do become untouchable — a pain that can be indescribable. For Dylan Lloyd, co-founder of Phoenix Down RPG, his efforts in pursuing a doctorate in Musical Arts caused the clarinet player to put down his instrument for years.

He had begun school with the intention of being an orchestra musician. By the time he entered his master’s program, his interests stretched beyond orchestra, which led him to pursue a doctorate in music — specifically exploring klezmer music, which by its most narrow definition is an instrumental folk music tradition of the Jewish people.

“It was a great way for me to have a good subject for my dissertation by exploring something that meant something to me, and push beyond a purely orchestra viewpoint,” Lloyd explained. “At the same time, getting a doctorate is exhausting. By the time I was done, I was a little burnt out on music. I graduated, and I honestly didn’t want to touch my instrument for a while.” 

Whether it’s sitting on a stand in the corner of your room, lying on your favorite chair, or collecting dust on the windowsill — the tools you create art and meaning with burn their eyes into the back of your head. The daunting task of perfection, significance and purpose looms in the background of your everyday thoughts.

A month turns into a year, then a year turns into two. The want slowly turns into a need, because that lost aspect of identity will make us feel whole again. For Lloyd, exploring his love for video game music through his background in classical training relit a fire within him.

Lloyd met his future wife, Teil Taliesin, at the University of Louisville while they were both pursuing a degree in music. Taliesin, a classically trained musician who began playing the oboe at a young age, still found the music to be incredibly invigorating as a university student, though she was tired of playing the same Eurocentric composers at every concert.

“I started feeling the lack of representation, not only of ethnicity, but of gender; female, non-binary … There’s a lot that I felt was missing from the orchestra stage, which led me to start playing oboe with a looping station,” Taliesin said. 

She calls her style of play oboetronica, something she has since worked into Phoenix Down RPG’s live performances.

“When Dylan started arranging video game music for an ensemble we didn’t have, I saw the passion that brought him back into music. That’s what got me excited about playing music that other people love,” she said.

Taliesin found more representation in the world of video game music than the world of classical music  not only in gender and ethnicity but in age and era. The composers within the video game industry are alive and well; though they reach a smaller audience their fanbases are filled with fervent followers.

Classical music is often associated with people of high-class. There’s an air of elitism around the genre based on the aesthetics paired with it — the grandiose of the concert hall, the ticket prices, the attire. 

But in recent years, classical music has been modernized with live orchestras performing movie scores during screenings or pop songs being arranged with strings to be used in shows like Bridgerton.

Similar to Ivy League colleges, classical music has been around for a very long time. We can put these institutions or genres of music on a pedestal due to their association with the upper class, but the associations are built on nothing. 

“There’s room and value in that,” Lloyd said of the high-end aspects of cultural music. “There’s also room and value of having a concert [for video games] where you can show up in your T-shirt and feel comfortable.”

The importance of community-based games

Recently Phoenix Down RPG received an Infusion Opportunity Fund grant to host 10 Campfire Tales over the next year. The event series involves live tabletop gaming with local creators as the players, adding, of course, interactive improvisatory music in front of an audience. 

Receiving the grant was a major milestone for the group, one that has been eight years in the making. 

After Lloyd started arranging music in 2016, he saw how important gaming became to Teil — not just video games, but community-based tabletop games.

“I got into playing Dungeons & Dragons at a time where I had hurt my shoulder and I was having a difficult time playing [music], so I needed another creative outlet,” Taliesin said. 

“I met a lot of gatekeeping in the D&D community,” she continued, “which essentially is a lot of male players either keeping me out of the community, making games that were very uncomfortable, or pushing boundaries in ways that they don’t with male players.”

These interactions inspired Taliesin to run her first D&D game at a classical music festival. Her plan was originally to do a one shot, which usually means a four-to-six-hour game with four to six players, but it ended up as a three day mini-campaign with 10 players involved.

The group continued gaming together after the festival and started streaming their games on Twitch. About a year in, the crew decided to set aside a weekend in Chicago to hangout and create character theme songs. They launched a series of albums called Dragon Ballad, which served as the inspiration for Campfire Tales.

Lloyd and Taliesin both valued that quality time — bonding with their new friends through the Dragon Ballad projects and playing off each member’s talents to create the different threads of a large tapestry.

The grant for Campfire Tales allows Phoenix Down RPG to expand on the project, hiring 30 local artists with the live performances being recorded for a podcast.

“There will be elements of audience interaction within these performances that help steer the path of the story as it’s unfolding. It’s going to be crazy fun,” Taliesin said. 

And what more could we ask for than community building, creative collaboration and crazy fun?