Mobius Band Make "Heaven" Bend Their Way

By: Brett Hickman

Sunday January 06, 2008

Photo by Emily Keegin

Taking their cues from classic pop song structures but infusing them with ear-bending usage of keyboard "circuit bending" (the art of opening up a keyboard's motherboard and shorting out its resistors to unique effect), the indie-rock trio Mobius Band weave a magical spell on their second album Heaven (Misra Records).

The band, comprised of Peter Sax, Noam Schatz and Ben Sterling, all met at a Massachusetts college and stayed together despite Sax and Sterling's move to New York City (where Sterling hailed from). Schatz's stay in Massachusetts may have made recording together harder (Heaven took 19 months to record), but as he was the one to crack open those yard sale keyboards to reconfigure their output, Noam's staying behind proved integral to the band's burgeoning and unique sound.

Sporting songs about heartbreak, betrayal and other human trials and tribulations, manipulated through strikingly original musical backdrops Heaven is one of the better albums to have been released in 2007 and should give the band plenty of opportunities to showcase themselves live in the new year.

Static Multimedia spoke to Sax after the band had returned from a two week tour of key U.S. cities not long after Heaven's release.

What attracted everyone together?

Peter Sax: We played together in a bunch of different entities. When we got out of school we just knew we wanted to get a house together and see what we could come up with as a band. At that point we had just gotten a sampler and had just started incorporating electronics into the sound. We were trying to figure out what we could do. So we just wanted to woodshed and see what happened.

How did you ultimately settle on writing duties?

PS: Our process has changed a lot over the years according to circumstance. We used to generate material by improvising some of the time and sometimes write things ourselves and bring it to the band. Now that Noam lives in Massachusetts and Ben and I are down here in New York a lot more of the material tends to get written in advance and then brought to the band and then wood shopped from there.

Has that been difficult with the space between all of you?

PS: Yeah it's not easy but it's just been accepted that you do the best you can. Ben and I had always been planning on moving down here and Noam didn't end up wanting to move to New York. It was less about the music scene. Ben had grown up in Manhattan and was itching to go home. For me I had just always been attracted to the city. It's not like any other place. I just wanted to get immersed in it. There's also a lot more opportunity on all kinds of different levels here. We had a lot of friends living here at the time. We had a lot of help in trying to figure out where we needed to be.

What were the early stages of the band like? Did you tour much or just play on the east coast a lot?

PS: When we moved here our first album was coming out. At that point it was less necessary to do little one-off shows. You get on more of a schedule where you're either writing and recording or touring so it was more compatible with not living in the same space.

What obstacles have you had to overcome since starting out? What have been some of the highs and lows since starting out?

PS: When we all lived in Massachusetts we were doing five or six shows a month. And those weren't back to back. Weeknights in Boston or New York or wherever and then three hour drives and we'd come home the night of the show at 5 AM and I'd have to be at work at my desk job at 8:30. So at the beginning before I had any clout at my day job it was really difficult.

Other lows were, when we were on our first national tour we were halfway to our first show and Noam got a call that his dad had passed away. At that point you have to decide how serious you are and you have to compare your dedication to your music to the death of a loved one. It's sort of interesting to see how that pans out. Noam took a week off to deal with stuff and Ben and I did a bunch of shows with an iPod drum track. And then a week after his dad died and he had to deal with everything, Noam came back on tour with us. It was definitely hard for him. I'm sure there were times when he wished he were home. When he had to make a choice whether to do shows in the face of something like that he realized it was important and he wanted to do the shows and he played them and they were awesome.

"Friends Like These"

Where in New York do you live, in Brooklyn?

PS: Yeah. Ben and I live in kind of the same neighborhood, Carroll Gardens. Williamsburg is the area people think of when they say Brooklyn. It's really warehouse-y and industrial with condos and hipsters everywhere. Our neighborhood is very mellow…my end is really Italian. It's definitely gentrified but it doesn't feel as forced and combative as some neighborhoods. It's a whole lifestyle living there. There are all these little grocers and stuff. Being away for the last six weeks made me realize what a unique place it is.

With the new album did you work with any producers or engineers or did you do it yourself?

PS: We worked with a few people. We had an engineer for the tracking session and then we had a couple people help us mix it. We definitely made a lot of the creative decisions and had to connect the dots between the different people who were helping us engineer it. A great deal of the sound design came from us, with a lot of it coming from Noam. He got into circuit bending old keyboards. He'd take an old or cheap Casio or Yamaha and short out the little resistors on the motherboard creating sounds that God never intended. He would bring those down to us while we were writing the album, which took two years, really meticulous. He'd bring the keyboards down and we'd use those to write songs. We don't have those keyboards onstage because we need the sounds to be the same each time or at least similar and these keyboards are pretty much unpredictable what they're going to do. So we sample it and then we bring the samplers (on the road). We were going through a lot of personal relationship/friendship difficulties that definitely informed a lot of the content, as that dragged out so did the writing process. We were tinkering and refiguring the songs until we felt we had them right.

Did you have any hand in the design of the album cover?

PS: Ben chose the cover photo. I think he chose some of the other photos, too. We had a friend of ours who's a graphic designer put it together.

The cover photo is by John Vanderslice, correct?

PS: Yeah. We played with him once and he's a real nice guy but we're not pals with him or anything.

What sort of things are you planning to do in the near future to promote the album?

PS: We're going to the UK in February and Europe in March.

What do you have planned after that?

PS: We have a lot of confidence in this record. We think it sounds pretty unique. I'm not sure there will be a time where we'll look back on this record with any disdain. I think we're going to keep trying to get it out there for as long as it continues doing good. There are a lot of albums out there that break slowly over the course of a year. If we can make that happen with this…we'll know because we're going to do our best to make that happen.

Do you have high-minded dreams of being able to do this for the rest of your life?

PS: I like to think that doing this for the rest of my life isn't too "high-minded" a dream. (Laughs) In fact I'm sure that's what will happen whether it's with this band or whatever. I think that this band has some legs. We'd like to be able to play around the country and headlining shows as long as people are into it. I think that's all you can really hope for. Nobody has any allusions that we're going to be like Interpol or something.

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Mobius Band Make "Heaven" Bend Their Way

By: Brett Hickman

Sunday January 06, 2008

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