Jonathan Jacky Builds QUAKEQUATION in Custer

It was October 2020, near the beginning of an 11,000-mile road trip around the country, and he had spent a few snowy days exploring the Black Hills before deciding to head south to Custer on his final night before continuing his adventure. It was Sunday evening and most of Custer was closed. Jacky was trying to save money and figured he could eat back at his hotel, but then he saw the open sign at the Custer Wolf and went inside for a falafel burger and fries. While he was there, he struck up a conversation with another patron, and before long they were next door having a beer. Somewhere in that conversation, Jacky learned about a music venue in town called the Custer Beacon. Surprised that a town as small as Custer had a dedicated music venue at all, the discovery stuck with him, especially because he was already looking for somewhere he could make more space for music in his life.

Jacky kept in touch with those he met that night and a few months later got a message that there was a room available in Custer and if he wanted to come back, there was a place for him. On March 31, 2021, he packed a U-Haul, brought his music equipment halfway across the country and arrived in Custer the night before April Fool’s Day. Five years later, the Beacon is where Jacky is preparing to put nearly everything he has learned as a musician into one long night.

On Friday, Oct. 23, QUAKEQUATION will take over the Custer Beacon for the vinyl release of Not Thinking Straight. Jacky is planning more than two hours of music built with three synthesizers, electric guitar, bass, trumpet, flugelhorn and vocals running through effects and live loops.

“I’m kind of taking this on, and it feels like kind of the biggest show of my professional career, to be honest,” Jacky said.

A trumpet player who wanted more

Music was already woven through Jacky’s family long before QUAKEQUATION existed. His parents met at a summer music camp, his mother studied music and later became a choir teacher, and his father played saxophone before becoming a math teacher. His siblings also stayed involved with music, including a brother who studied organ performance at Oberlin and later Yale.

Jacky actually wanted to be a drummer. Instead, an aunt had a trumpet available, he tried it, and by his own account he was immediately pretty good at it. He already knew how to read music through piano lessons and had shown an early instinct for harmony. In elementary music class, he remembers naturally singing a third above the melody while the rest of the class turned around to figure out what he was doing. By high school, trumpet had become the obvious path.

That path took him to Wright State University outside Dayton, Ohio, where he studied trumpet performance. He received scholarship offers, performed in ensembles, won the university’s concerto and aria competition and sang at Carnegie Hall with Wright State’s Collegiate Chorale.

At the same time, another version of his musical life was developing nearby in Yellow Springs. Jacky began playing with the psychedelic band Speaking Suns, moving between conservatory training and a looser music scene that offered very different possibilities. During one performance connected to Dave Chappelle’s activities in Yellow Springs, Jacky wound up playing in an improvised jam with Chappelle and other musicians.

After Wright State, Jacky enrolled at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music for a master’s degree in trumpet performance. The program was intense, and the pressure took a toll. He nearly dropped out and considered taking a semester off before returning to finish the degree in December 2019.

Three months later, the pandemic shut much of the performing world down. Jacky had just completed years of formal musical training, but instead of stepping cleanly into the career that training was supposed to produce, he found himself substitute teaching in the same southern Ohio town where he had grown up.

Making room for the other instruments

During the pandemic, Jacky stepped back from trumpet and started spending more time with the other parts of his musicianship that had been sitting on the sidelines. He pieced together a drum kit, returned to the Fender Stratocaster he had owned since undergrad and kept experimenting with looping. At the same time, he was trying to figure out where he wanted to go next, musically and otherwise.

That fall, he took off on an 11,000-mile road trip around the country. The Black Hills were already familiar from childhood trips west, but this time he stayed long enough to explore on his own. He spent several nights in Keystone, drove through the Badlands and eventually made his way to Custer, a town his family had never gotten around to visiting on those earlier trips. By the time he returned for good the following spring, he broght with him years of formal training, a growing collection of ideas and a strong sense that he’d found a place where he could finally put those pieces together.

“The reason I came out here was because I needed, I wanted to put my stuff together, my music together,” Jacky said. “I really wanted to have the space to do that.”

He worked at the Beacon during his first summer in town and started playing locally, while the pace of Custer gave him time to explore different sides of his musicianship. Guitar, drums, bass, synthesizers, vocals and looping became increasingly central to his work, while trumpet eventually found its way back in on different terms. On Not Thinking Straight, he played most of the instruments and mixed nearly the entire EP himself, along with the unreleased B-side material included on the vinyl. QUAKEQUATION became a way to present himself not simply as a trumpet player, but as someone writing, arranging, recording, producing and performing the work.

QUAKEQUATION gives those different parts of his musicianship a place to exist together. Jacky sees the project as a more authentic representation of himself as an artist: not only a trumpet player, but someone writing, arranging, recording, producing and performing the work.

QUAKEQUATION takes shape

The name QUAKEQUATION (pronounced: Quake Equation) came to Jacky during an open mic at the Beacon around 2021 or 2022. He had been playing what he now describes as a quirky, probably forgettable minimalist guitar-looping set, building an electric guitar loop, letting it continue and then walking over to the drum kit to play along with himself.

Jacky likes wordplay, and the name came partly from the way “quake” and “equation” collide around a shared E. He also found connections to ideas that were already important to him: movement, disruption, mathematics, patterns and his interest in metaphysical thinking.

His father had been his calculus teacher in high school, and Jacky grew up around the idea of mathematics as a way of describing patterns that already exist. He talks about the “equation” side of QUAKEQUATION in similar terms, while leaving enough ambiguity that listeners do not have to share his interpretation to understand the project.

The music operates in much the same way. A QUAKEQUATION performance can begin with one instrument and accumulate piece by piece as Jacky records loops, adds another part, switches instruments and continues building around what is already playing.

Guitar can become the foundation for bass, synthesizers, horns and effected vocals. At another point, Jacky may leave one instrument to pick up another. Watching him perform makes the construction visible. Instead of arriving with a band already assembled, Jacky effectively builds one around himself while the audience watches. That layered approach carries into Not Thinking Straight. The EP moves through drums, bass, guitar and keys, then broadens with strings and horns. Across the record, drum grooves, bass lines, brass, strings and vocals move in and out of the arrangements without losing the cohesion of music built largely by one person.

“Aversions” opens with instruments played backward, an appropriately unsettled entrance for a song built around avoidance. From there, the record repeatedly plays with tension and release, moving between sparse passages and fuller arrangements as strings, brass, rhythm section and vocals enter and recede. Elsewhere, Jacky’s vocals move from ethereal to more forceful, while the arrangements repeatedly build tension and release through short instrumental episodes and layered transitions.

Jacky is interested in pushing the music into unfamiliar territory without losing the listener along the way. He wants to experiment, but he also wants the result to remain something people can actually connect with.

“I want to explore things with music that, you know, have never been done before,” Jacky said. But experimentation alone is not enough for him. “It also has to be consumable and palatable.”

That balance is something he thinks about often. QUAKEQUATION can get strange, but Jacky does not want strangeness itself to become the point. Not Thinking Straight shows that balance pretty clearly. The arrangements can be experimental without abandoning familiar musical anchors, moving between minimalist passages and fuller chord progressions while keeping melody and rhythm within reach. The mix carries some indie roughness around the edges, but there is also a lot of precision in how the parts enter, disappear and return.

What stands out across the EP is how much ground Jacky covers without the record sounding like a demonstration of how many instruments he can play. The parts are there to serve the songs, even when the arrangements get dense.

Building it in Custer

His musical ambition comes out in similar language. He wants to see what happens when he follows an idea farther than he already knows how to take it, while still making something an audience can enter with him.

That ambition does not translate into wanting QUAKEQUATION booked at a local bar every Friday and Saturday night. Jacky has intentionally resisted that route.

He wants fewer QUAKEQUATION shows to carry more weight. He is looking toward festivals and performances outside the Black Hills while also building a much larger body of recorded work. Jacky is currently tracking the instruments for a full-length double LP planned for next year, and much of the music he will play Friday comes from that new material, alongside a couple of songs from Not Thinking Straight.

The solo-looping format is not necessarily the final form of QUAKEQUATION. Jacky has always intended to eventually put a band together around the project and collaborate with other musicians on the catalog. For now, the looping setup gives him a way to perform the music himself while that catalog continues to grow.

Back at the Beacon

Friday’s set will pull together a couple of songs from Not Thinking Straight and a larger body of unreleased music Jacky is developing for the next QUAKEQUATION record. Some of those pieces have existed primarily as live-looping material while he works through the longer process of tracking each instrument for the studio versions.

A Roland Juno-X synthesizer will make its live debut in his setup. Jacky is also planning visualizers, lighting, fog and the Beacon’s disco ball, turning the night into something closer to the production he imagines for QUAKEQUATION than a standard album-release set. The mix carries an indie character with a polished finish, and even the denser arrangements remain carefully controlled.

The Beacon has been sitting at both ends of Jacky’s Custer story. It was the music venue he first heard about over a beer during that strange October stop in 2020, and later the place where an early guitar-looping experiment produced the name QUAKEQUATION.