“He wrote for the DN about music and he knew everybody in music in Lincoln at the time, so that got us off the ground.” “Charles and I started writing songs together very close to exactly 20 years ago from around now,” Rebarber says. He’s the man behind the sound, the final word on every track, and he works slowly. Rebarber was and still is a UNL mathematics professor, and the other half of the core of Floating Opera.

“I'm not sure how it was exactly I caught wind of Richard, but when I heard he was an experimental composer, in the Eno/Reich/Zorn vein, I gave him a call and we became fast friends immediately,” Lieurance says. In 1991, Lieurance was an editor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s student newspaper, the Daily Nebraskan, and he wanted to win an award for a faculty interest story. That is, journalists typically don’t start bands in order to have something to cover. “Floating Opera has never had to spend two months in a van arguing over pizza, soap and the free bed at some girl's house in Utah.”įloating Opera doesn’t really meet the definition of a textbook band, and their origin lies far from where most groups plan to start. “Well, longevity is easier if the group you're a part of is a floating/ever-changing bunch of people,” says Charles Lieurance, the band's lyricist and co-founder.

And 20 years is a lot to put into perspective. Friday, they’re putting it all into perspective at Omaha’s Side Door Lounge. They’ve been cranking out atmospheric, popping, rocking, crooning, swooning, glitching, droning, syncopating, string-strumming, skin-beating, studio-distorting, member-rotating, sonic-shifting tunes for the last 20 years, and they’ve never been anything more than a “Lincoln band.” Since 1991 they’ve been behind the scenes of Lincoln music history.

Say hello to Floating Opera, Lincoln’s longest lived, most educated chamber pop collective. So it's impressive when a group of people can keep their noses to the grind for such a long stretch, especially when that group of people is trying to make music. Work, marriage, school - few people can take more than a decade, let alone two. Doing anything for 20 years can take its toll.

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