The Belfast experimental collective’s fifth album, five hours long and entirely self-produced, is out November 13th, inspired by Marina Abramović’s durational art.
Robocobra Quartet have announced Hundred Pieces, a new album made up of 100 songs, alongside new single ‘Haha’. It’s out Friday November 13th.
We’ve followed Robocobra Quartet for a long time, from an early first listen of ‘Blue Sky Sinking’ through the jazz-post-punk of ‘Heaven’, their Northern Ireland Music Prize win in 2022, and drummer/vocalist Chris Ryan’s solo Sorbet EP right up to 2022 Irish album of the year listed Living Isn’t Easy, and this sounds like their most ambitious project yet.
Formed around Chris W Ryan, who’s fast becoming a producer in demand in his own right, having recently worked on records by Chalk, Just Mustard and TTSSFU, Robocobra Quartet built a cult following since 2016 debut Music for All Occasions through a revolving cast of collaborators, some with formal conservatoire training, others with none at all.
The idea for Hundred Pieces reportedly started as a joke, an off-hand remark about a 100-track album that the band quickly started writing toward in earnest, inspired by the durational art of Marina Abramović and specifically her memoir Walk Through Walls. Saxophonist Thibault Barillon began growing petri dishes of fungus at home to use for the album artwork, a process that became intertwined with the writing itself, furthering the band’s interest in chance as a creative tool. Some songs, like ‘Haha’ and ‘Nothing’, became complex studio productions laboured over for months; others, like ‘Gilded’ and ‘Ashes Again’, are moments captured and finished within minutes.
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‘Haha’ is built on the foundation of a rolling spiked bassline that builds with distant siren horns and Ryan’s faux-motivational spoken lyrics.
“The petri dishes were an exploration of beauty in the natural world,” Barillon says. “As time went by and we worked on the album, the band became more aware of the parallels with the process of the hundred: chance-based moments and letting songs find themselves, melodies and riffs as spores spreading and growing, the cross pollination, the joy of the process and the beauty of art taking a life of its own that the artist hadn’t intended.”
“In a way this album could only exist by being self-produced, owing to the large number of engineer and production minds in the band,” Ryan says. “Often when I work with other artists, it can be that very first demo that has the magic in it, but other times a song only works once it has been heavily produced. With this album we were able to experiment with that and push songs only as far as they ‘ask’ for.”
Robocobra Quartet currently includes Chris W Ryan (drums, vocals), Finn McCarthy (bass), Ryan Burrowes (samplers, keys), Peter Howard (sax, keys), Tom Tabori (sax, samplers) and Thibault Barillon (sax, artwork).
Live dates:
- Saturday October 24th – NCH, Dublin (Haunted Dancehall)
- Thursday November 19th – ICA, London (London Jazz Festival)
Hundred Pieces is out November 13th.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
