Rubber Band Banjo is a self-educated musician who likes to tinker around with new forms of music making. Starting off as an electronic musician in November 2001, a wretched EP was created with the demo version of a cheap program in four days flat. It sounds somewhere in between the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack, video game music, and Mr. Bungle gone horribly wrong.
The first full-length album entitled Hybrid Musical Organisms, self-released in March 2002, was a much-needed improvement on the theme of zany video game soundtracks and genre-hopping. On this album, every note was sequenced by RBB alone.
The second full-length album Gather Your Junk Together was an attempt to expand the bloop-bleepy Perrey and Kingsley meets Mr. Bungle Nintendo-esque music sound of the HMO album. GYJT is a mishmash of different genres from the electronic musical junkyard, originally self-released in December 2002. This album turned out to be multi-genre tracks composed of manipulated sounds and homemade melodies. The tracks vary from the video game soundtrack - Middle Eastern - trip hop - banjo - beat box musical collage of Arcade Trip Bop and Roll to the two-step rhythmic record scratching freak out of Evidence That DNA Can Act As A Wire to trash can fusion in Reconstruction Of A Metabolic Pathway. This album was distributed by CD Baby and iTunes starting in May 2004.
A third full-length album Hypermutator was released on MEME Records (www.memerecords.net) in May 2005 and also distributed via CD Baby/iTunes. This album was loosely inspired by the mechanisms of evolutionary change in bacteria with high mutation rates and was constructed using heavy tweaking of electronic sounds, guitar percussion, shortwave radio, and natural recordings. Hypermutator purposely fuses and jumps between IDM, krautrock, jazz, video game music, cut-ups, drums 'n' bass, dub, and no-wave. Tracks from this album have somehow appeared on over 30 podcasts to date and played on several radio stations, including Don Campau's No Pigeonholes show and Australia's ISON Live Radio.
In August 2005, the Repeating Elements EP was released as a FREE mp3 download on www.rubberbandbanjo.com. This EP was constructed using an electronic drum set, lap steel percussion, and homemade instruments. This is a 19+ minute collage piece of interacting repeating elements where the tracks flow freely into one another.
In February 2007, the fourth full-length Rubber Band Banjo album The Circlemaker was released on Weirdomusic Recordings. This album emphasizes the use of unfamiliar sounds played on homemade instruments and electrified objects. The rhythmic sound sources include 3-stringed and rubber band zithers with percussion on both electronic drums and objects amplified with contact mics. As a result the album is largely percussive driven, but has ambient and dynamic qualities from the natural recordings, software synthesizers, voice, and shortwave radio. These recordings are inspired by avant rock, krautrock, and whatever comes out of experimenting with electrified objects and instruments largely made from junked parts. Some of these tracks are currently being played on Weirdsville! Web Radio.
All albums are available on www.rubberbandbanjo.com for $10 worldwide (price includes shipping), CD Baby, iTunes, and other digital download services. Click on the images below for purchase info:
Buy Hypermutator tracks on iTunes or Gather Your Junk Together tracks on iTunes
