Indie folk-rock-electronica trio Mobius Band, have a great new album "Heaven" out and are playing a bound to be danceable show with Matthew Dear, this Thursday at RNR and so we sent Ben off (who has been raving about them since he saw them with Tom Vek a while back) on their trail. Here is what he and Peter Sax talked about (namely heartbreak, dinosaur Casios and 10 dollar car batteries). Read Up.
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Mobius Band’s guitarist and co-vocalist Peter Sax thinks the band’s most synchronized touring partners were The National. I told him I thought it was Tom Vek. Chalk it up to difference of opinion.
Sax says City versus Country was the electronic, but organic record. I think it’s the group’s latest effort, Heaven.
Although I’m batting zero-for-two, we can agree to disagree, and be pals regardless. Sax can even understand my viewpoint on the heightened amount of electronic instrumentation on the record, even if he thinks it’s wrong.
While the band was in Minneapolis, the band saw a man performing under the moniker Food Team who was a master of circuit bending – performing with lobotomized, dinosaur Casio and Yamaha keyboards that had short circuits inserted into them.
Noam, our drummer, got really into making these things and he’s got an attic full of all these keyboards he got on EBay for 10 or 15 bucks,” Sax says. “Ben and I would use them to write. We’d get a sound, sample it, and mess with it from there. We were much m ore excited about a particular concept in terms of the electronic stuff, and in some ways, there is more electronic sounds on this record.”
Electronica was always at the conceptual forefront during the creation of Mobius Band, which Sax says the group utilized to branch out and break away from the clichéd “power trio” format at the time. And while early efforts were more spacey and less structured, the band has shifted to a more traditional verse/chorus format for Heaven.
Conceptually, the title of the record was all about taking ownership of some of the negative things that happen to a person and realizing that some of the most beautiful things can come from incredibly troubling and difficult circumstances.
“These songs on the album are created because of these unfortunate circumstances, but the process of making the songs becomes the release,” Sax says. “Heaven is this glorified idea where everything is perfect, but it’s cool that it’s coming from imperfect circumstances. And calling that ‘heaven’ is like saying nothing is ever perfect, and everything has both good and bad in it.”
At times, the album was absolutely painstaking to create. “Friends Like These” – a song penned about singer Ben Sterling’s girlfriend leaving him for a mutual friend of their bandmates – took 15 months to complete.
“Naturally, I didn’t know what to make of that situation, and one of my many potential emotional approaches was to reject that friend, so I wrote the song from that standpoint,” Sax says. “I didn’t end up rejecting the friend, and the popularity of that decision is debatable.”
After going through an estimated 700 different iterations of the track, the band had the song down pat. Several of the sticking points came during the lyrical revisions of the song, in which Sax tried to make the song less obvious.
“I revise these songs so it isn’t too ‘heart on your sleeve,’ because you have to leave some stuff up to the imagination,” he says.
In addition to recording Heaven, Mobius Band was invited by Stereogum to record a track for “OK X,” a Radiohead tribute record where indie acts each covered a track off of “OK Computer.” The band originally wanted “Let Down” (which was taken by David Bazan), but decided to run with “Subterranean Homesick Alien” instead.
“We thought about how to approach this – we never play anything in three-meter, so I thought of that as being the most unlikely thing we’d do,” Sax says. “Then, we thought about doing it as a suicide song with a driving, quiet electronic beat; I think it came out pretty cool.”
Sax recalls the District as being one of the most hospitable cities he's ever played in. While the band was in Philadelphia, the group stopped to get a new alternator for their van at a Strauss Discount Auto – by the time pulled into D.C, the electric on the car was dead.
The band's saving grace was a strange man wandering aimlessly up and down U Street with a car battery. He ended up selling it to the band for 10 bucks.
“I don’t know how he knew [we needed it], but someone was lurking around and trying to make some money and must’ve seen our dim headlights,” Sax said.
And it was that D.C. generosity that kept the band’s van putzing along for the length of the tour — right up until the thing died on the highway right before Easter while the band was shooting along at 60 miles an hour.
Talk about a shitty time for your power steering to die.
God loves a cheerful giver.
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