Listening to Corbu, a Brooklyn based collective led by Jonathan Graves, is like playing tug-o-war with reality. Maybe it’s the combination of electronic vs. acoustic and select sampling that help me abandon my worries and float away into the abyss. Maybe it’s the soothing, sexy vocals.. whatever it is I dig it. These guys make me wanna sit back, light up, and listen.
When I listen to Corbu I can’t help but envision a collage of sound. It is abstract, artistic, emotional. Their live shows feature visuals that reflect this abstract motive. Layers upon layers of energy that often build up to a heavenly release. Jonathan Graves voice, the melodies, the overall vibe is encompassing. The manner in which duo perform and produce music reminds me of Noah Lennox’s {Panda Bear} latter albums- which is no complaint on my end.
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I had a few questions so I contacted Jonathan to see if I could find some answers about the origin of the group and where they find their inspiration.
MWL: First off I want to thank you for taking the time to answer these questions for me, I know you’re a busy guy.. making music, teaching music, you do teach music to children right?
JG: I teach music to all ages, but started teaching kids a lot more in the past year.
It’s really changed the way I approach things, especially music – being around kids all the time makes it hard to take yourself too seriously. They’re all about joy for the sake of joy, and that’s worn off on me. Kids are an anti-depressant.
MWL: If so, I imagine this must be pretty inspiring. Any other major inspirations, people, musicians, experiences?
JG: Dreams are really important to me. I’ve always had intense and lucid dreams since I was little, and as I’ve gotten older they’ve taken on a lot more meaning for me. I think the world you experience when you’re dreaming is physically real, in some way. I don’t understand it at all, but I’ve had enough intense experiences to justify that belief. So for me, it’s a sort of parallel reality to our normal, waking consciousness – one where time doesn’t exist and dead relatives can hang out with you. Whenever I’m making art or music, I feel like I’m trying to reach over into that place and bring some of it back into this one.
MWL: Before I get too invested in the details, what does ‘Corbu’ mean? and why did you decide it was a good fit?
JG: “Corbu” is the nickname of Le Corbusier, a Swiss architect that was one of the pioneers of modern architecture. He was a European contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright. My girlfriend at the time was in architecture school when I was starting to write this music, and the stuff she was learning blew my mind – it taught me how to see in a new way. It was a really beautiful and exciting time, and the name “Corbu” was being brought up a lot, so I just grabbed it for the band. I don’t have any particular attachment to Corbusier’s work – you could argue that he invented the modern slum – but I love aspects of his thought process, and he experimented heavily with using the Golden Ratio, something Bryan and I have always been fascinated by. The name means many different things to me.
MWL: Do you have any formal music training or has it always been a natural interest?
JG: I’ve been singing since I was 10, and playing piano since slightly before that. I went to music school for a minute but hated it and transferred pretty quickly. I grew up playing music by ear and resisted theory because it was never properly related to me. It’s been fun to go back into it now and make it relevant to myself – picking apart the chord structure of a Solar Bears track or all the key changes in “Good Vibrations,” for example. It’s one of my favorite forms of procrastination.
MWL: Has Corbu always been the two of you?
JG: Corbu started out as just me, writing and recording in my apartment, but Bryan has been around since that time and we started working together once I had a concept and a group of songs that expressed some kind of identity. Since then we’ve written individually and collaboratively.
MWL: How did you guys meet, and when did you start producing music together?
JG: I wandered into a coffeeshop and Bryan was making these beautiful ambient loops with his guitar. I was having a really bad day and his music sort of brought me out of it. I walked over to him after he finished playing and we talked about starting a band that would sound like Boards of Canada’s “Geogaddi” with guitars. It’s funny how close that ended up being to what we would eventually aim for together. I made the first Corbu EP, Jane, in 2008. Bryan helped me mix it and we started working out the songs to play live and writing together after that.
MWL: Your live shows are pretty intense, I imagine you feel a lot of that energy on stage- is there ever any improvisation based on that energy or do you prefer to keep it clean to the track?
JG: Thanks. Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher) said this thing that I really relate to:
“I’ve always wanted to sabotage coolness as for me music is about laughing and crying, not about standing around smoking cigarettes.”
It can be nerve-wracking to let your guard down and allow yourself to be vulnerable and “into it” on-stage, but musicians that do that are the only ones I’ve ever really connected with.
As far as improvisation, it’s funny – I used to resist improvisation, while Bryan would always advocate for it. Now I try to improvise as much as possible within the set. I think my problem came from the fact that most improvised music I was exposed to wasn’t very good, and I also didn’t have the confidence as an instrumentalist to play whatever came into my head. I’m still not where I’d like to be on that front, but I’ve come a long way. Seeing Jamie Lidell perform changed the way I see improvisation – he and other artists like Battles and Animal Collective showed me how it could be abrasive and cathartic and exciting, and not just… formless.
It’s always a balancing act with us, and we’re always trying to become more “live” and in the moment.
I saw Dustin Wong perform last month in an art space in Greenpoint, and he had kids throwing themselves off the walls by just playing guitar through a loop pedal. He could have had a masterfully pre-recorded, 8-piece laptop thing backing him up and it wouldn’t have been as fun to watch or listen to.
MWL: Do you have a favorite track? One that really sticks out form the others?
JG: It changes constantly, as I hope it always will. Whatever song I’m the most excited about is what I’ll be in my room working on. Some older songs like Marching Orders never seem to lose their relevance, though. I never feel like I’ve done that song justice on a recording. My favorite track at this moment is “Believe the Lie,” which is almost finished.
MWL: It seems like y’all are always coming out with new and exciting tracks, where do you find the time?
JG: We’re very good at starting things and pretty bad at finishing them. We get distracted by new sounds and ideas, and it’s hard to pull ourselves back to a group of songs and form them together, mix them and say “HERE, done.”
We’re unsigned, so we have to stay busy with our jobs and our lives. I think we both constantly feel the need to create new things, so almost all of our energy goes towards that, exploring new ideas in our little studios in our apartments. The next step is to actually package together a proper release, even just a short EP.
MWL: I have to ask, your visuals are so striking, they certainly play a role in the live experience. Who does your visuals?
JG: The visual aspect of Corbu is really important to me, almost as much as the music sometimes. When I was writing the first songs and figuring out what this thing was, I had a color palette that kept re-emerging in my head. It’s basically a fuzzy, ambiguous version of the primary colors – light blue with a little green in it, this creamy red color that some people think is orange, and an orange that a lot of people see as yellow. I was sketching and making a lot of art in those colors, and the music sort of formed itself around them.
They’re these bright, vivid colors that look like they’ve aged and faded away, almost like a memory of them. I’ve done all the live visuals to this point by collaging sampled videos together and throwing in some design I’ve made on the computer.
MWL: Any news I can share with our listeners? Any albums in the future, tours, videos?
JG: All I can say is that we’ve been very quiet this past year writing and that we’ll be almost annoyingly public and self-promotional in the coming year. Up to this point we’ve done nothing but write and play live – we need to be finishing stuff and releasing it, so that will be the theme of this year. I’m also having a lot of fun lately with video editing and motion graphics, so I want to make a ton of weird little videos for everything we release.
MWL: Lastly, Corbu is very spiritual… is there a specific message you wish to send to your listeners?
JG: It’s interesting that the spritual aspect comes through. Bryan and I were both raised by Beatles fans, and they sang songs like “All You Need is Love.” Neither of us subscribe to any religion, but we learn things in life and maybe we relate those through some of our lyrics.
Ambiguity and abstraction facilitate interaction, and I would never want a song to have a singular meaning or message. Like Thom Yorke said in some interview, I mostly write songs to work out things I don’t fully understand, or to answer questions that have no answer. If something we write attaches itself to something in your life, then we’ve connected with each other. That’s all we’re trying to do, ultimately.
Interested in getting more info about upcoming shows and recently released tracks?? Check out the band on their website, facebook and myspace!
By: Katie McVeay| Beat-Play Ambassador New York | @crookedsunshine|Music Without Labels & Beat-Play, LLC