Fully Absorbed – Indianapolis Monthly

“Can you smell the rain?” Owen Thomas asks. He sits on a couch flanked by two windows, a large, healthy ficus bonsai on the sill of each, shimmering against the backdrop of a brilliant, choppy gray sky. One window is open, and through it the smell of rain drifts, permeating and changing the atmosphere of the room. “There’s a word for that,” Thomas goes on, but it sits stubbornly on the tip of his tongue.

The word is petrichor, from the Greek roots “petra,” meaning stone, and “ichor,” or gods’ blood. The immersive, all-encompassing experience this phenomenon brings into the small, airy studio above Square Cat Vinyl on Virginia Avenue is emblematic of the creative agency and music label Thomas runs from the space with business partner Jared Sparkman—a venture they’ve aptly named Absorb.

Note: Stylistically, the period is included in the name—a carryover from Thomas’ solo album, Languages. {Or: Get Dark & Find Yourself.}, which boasts his playful relationship with language (along with a preponderance of deceptively upbeat songs about heartbreak in his signature contemplative, heartland rock style). The album’s release coincided with Thomas’ transition to running his own company, both coming on the heels of his 10 years as frontman of rock band The Elms, which called it quits in 2010.

The reason for The Elms’ breakup is simple, though at the time, with their fan base and popularity growing, it seemed the only direction for the four guys from rural Indiana and Missouri to go was up. Their last album together, The Great American Midrange, hit No. 18 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. They toured with Peter Frampton, their hit “Back to Indiana” was the official theme song of the 2010 Big Ten Conference, and they performed at Farm Aid alongside Willie Nelson and Neil Young. But, as Thomas states, “It just seemed like that’s what the planets were saying, that it was time for a new chapter.”

So, on they moved. Guitarist Thom Daugherty became a backing musician for Grammy-winning country stars The Band Perry. Bassist Nathan Bennett became a Realtor. Drummer Christopher, Thomas’ younger brother, started a family.

Thomas, who had always handled the identity work and design for The Elms’ shows, albums, and merch, began receiving requests from industry acquaintances to lend his keen artistic eye to their visual materials. The planets were talking again. He partnered with Sparkman, a filmmaker and friend from Seymour, Indiana, to start Absorb., with Thomas as creative director and Sparkman as producer. Twelve years later, the pair is still at it, flying under the radar while booking jobs with local and national acts.

According to Thomas, “The name Absorb. simply encapsulates what I hope happens when people see or hear our work. We hope that they’re truly affected by it and understand it in a clear, multisensory way.” A peek at the part of Absorb.’s website (absorbme.com) showcasing their creative agency work has that effect, with its white-on-black text and grid of still and moving graphics previewing their album art, merchandise, live shows, museum exhibits, and music and lyric videos. It’s hard not to feel like your eyes have been peeled open Ludovico Technique–style. But it’s the heady kind of sensory overload that makes you want to hang around and, well, absorb it all.

It matches Thomas’ kinetic personality. His well of entertainment business knowledge—all self-taught—is deep and gives him the air of someone who belongs in a bigger town, yet he has a distinctly Midwestern warmth. Sparkman is more laid-back. He’s the one with the eye for technical detail, who assembles the ingredients that make the magic real. Before Absorb., he worked in IT, but he says he’s always gravitated to creative work.

Photo courtesy Lissyelle Laricchia

Thomas and Sparkman’s design projects pair with music that runs the gamut of styles, from country to experimental rap, and superbly capture a range of moods and emotions. The art for duo Dream Chief’s hypnotic R&B/pop tune “Love Me Back” depicts the bittersweetness of infatuation through distorted closeups of satin-soft flowers. The bold typeface, monumental collages, and bright primary colors of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum’s 2022 exhibit Roadsters 2 Records conveys the thrill of the Indy 500 in its most innovative era, the 1960s and early ’70s. The Band Perry’s blacked-out 2017 performance of “Stay in the Dark” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, lit only by a circle of black-clad dancers holding bright spotlights, titillates with its suggestion of body parts and silhouettes glimpsed in the low light.

Image by Absorb

Along with the two others on their team, project manager Brianna Aragon and strategic partnerships manager Michael Slonim, Absorb. relies on the help of a slew of collaborators from around Indy and the U.S. “We’re counting on these people to bring in their own creative sensibilities, which we have massive respect for. It makes it easy to let go of control on something that you know they’re only going to elevate,” Thomas says, noting that all his old bandmates have played on Absorb. tracks.

Sparkman points out that Indy is special because people are far more supportive than in other places. “We’ve worked in New York. We’ve worked in LA. We’ve worked in Nashville. The thing about Indy [is that] the doors, when you knock, they get answered much more welcoming than others.”

Photo courtesy Owen Thomas

Indy residents will notice evidence of the local connections in scenes off the streets of the city. Look for landmarks on a driver-for-hire’s midnight journey in the video for Kishi Bashi’s dreamy “Can’t Let Go, Juno,” filmed in and around downtown. The driver’s weariness as he shuttles around fares who party, argue, and make out in his backseat is relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a weekend late shift, but it melts away in an instant as he observes a moment of purity between a mother and daughter. And folks in Fountain Square may recognize the streets Jon McLaughlin playfully soft-shoes down in one continuous take that makes up the bulk of the video for the achingly sweet, piano-driven “Why It Hurts.”

As for the label, which emerged out of the creative agency in 2020, Thomas and Sparkman emphasize that their focus is on developing artists whose desire is to build their careers thoughtfully and to explore and hone their craft before fully stepping out professionally. “They actually get to know us. It’s not only working together as a business, but it’s also a relationship,” says Absorb. artist Frank, who lounges on a couch in the studio next to another mononymous local artist, Bayem. Sparkman and Thomas have worked with both since 2020 and have supported them through transformations both personal and professional.

Frank is bubblier and more approachable than the impression given by her online persona, which is a little bit witchy, a little bit grunge, a little bit Debbie Harry updated with a full sleeve. Her collection of songs boasts various styles, but her most recent ones, the banger “Sick of Yourself” and the dark and angsty “Stupider,” have a raw, ’90s vibe hearkening to Hole or Liz Phair’s most memorable hits. After testing genres and landing where she’s most comfortable, she’s preparing to record her next single, “Stuck in Reno,” as of this writing, with a flight to Nevada to film the video already booked.

Letting an artist dabble in different styles seems counterintuitive when record labels usually expect them to demonstrate they can make the big bucks within a certain timeframe or be sidelined, but it’s exactly what Absorb. encourages. “The artist development process is a lot of feeling around in the dark and just learning who people are as artists and as humans over time,” Thomas says. “You’re not looking for something that’s fully forged out of the gate. Nothing is. No one is.”

While all labels have A&R—artist and repertoire—departments responsible for “developing” talent and preparing them to make albums, Absorb. follows a much slower, artist-directed strategy that values personal passion above hasty profits. According to Thomas, this helps avoid the all-too-common identity crisis many young performers eventually undergo when their sound and aesthetic are determined by the label. “They inevitably reach this point where it’s like, I’m the most famous person in the world, and nobody actually knows me,” Thomas says. “That’s when they begin a self-discovery process that takes a lot of time and can be disastrous on a person’s mental health.”

Next to Frank, Bayem is somewhat reserved, but there’s an elegant alertness behind the calm. While February’s “Regrets” is a throwback to the golden age of neo soul, down to the drippy gold lighting and open-front button-down he dons in the video, his most recent song, “Avalanche,” like most of his work, combines elements of R&B, contemporary pop, and electronic music, often with a heavy dose of synthy ’80s Eurodisco or electropop. This at times unexpected but always seamless integration of styles gives his songs powerful texture. The 2020 single “Pressure,” the perfect summer earworm with its irresistibly buoyant rhythm and video game tones, was featured in an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, while “Joyride” was in Hulu’s original film, Sex Appeal.

Despite being more established in his sound, Bayem didn’t perform live until this past April, when he played two sold-out shows at Lo-Fi Lounge. This measured approach was part of Thomas and Sparkman’s plan. “There was this constant preaching of just taking it a step at a time,” Bayem says. “[That] kind of solidified in my mind that before anything happens, I need to make sure that internally I’m the person I need to be to fully maximize that opportunity or just be a good steward over it,”

Thomas shares that Absorb. didn’t want Bayem to play a show until he had a full set of songs that represented him “in a way that’s the most truthful.” The technique paid off, as others have taken note of Bayem’s mature, unique sound and confident stage presence: His next appearance is this month at The Peppermint Club in LA, which scouted him for Breaking Sound, their regular showcase of up-and-coming artists. The show will be followed by stops in Chicago and Nashville before he returns home to celebrate the release of his next EP by headlining the Hi-Fi on December 14.

As for what comes next, Bayem and Frank are constantly dropping new music. In fact, the two have paired to form a side group, Polychrome, leading to May’s “Sunday Morning.” The art for the track says it all: Frank in a gold sequined bodysuit. Bayem in a purple silk shirt, afro picked out into a shining sphere. It’s disco, baby—another super chill summer anthem, the kind of song you put on a feel-good mix.

Ultimately, Sparkman and Thomas want their artists to blow up so big they fill stadiums and “get the Palm Springs and Paris houses.” But if that happens, “it’ll happen because it’s in a way that’s true to them and true to us as a company,” Sparkman says.

In the meantime, he and Thomas continue building up their ecosystem of staff and collaborators, hoping Absorb. becomes a “de facto contributor to the health of the music scene in town.”

“I don’t want Absorb. to be a household name,” Thomas laughs. “I want our artists to be household names.” 

Photo by Jay Goldz