Consisting of Daniel Munkus, Heather Sommerlad, and Rachel Epp, Old Robes is an “electronic looping trio.” Originally a moniker for Munkus’s solo work, Old Robes expanded into a group when Sommerlad and Epp joined him onstage in 2012 and they quickly came to realise that they shared a creative and personal bond worth exploring. And explore they did, with little in the way of visions or preconceptions for what their future output would look like, spending years playing with a whole host of styles and sounds and sources of inspiration, with nothing beyond a moment of epiphany tying them together. As Munkus explains:
“I have carried this music inside me, like a dream, since I was fourteen years old. For twenty-four years, I struggled and failed to bring it to life, until one night I woke from a literal dream. In that dream, I dreamt of a stained glass spider. It was crawling all over the walls of my darkened bedroom. It illuminated everything it touched with a technicolor web. The room was translucent and magical. I stood in the dream, marveling, and thought to myself that we all have the right to do what this spider is doing. We all have the right to weave our own creative web. When I woke from that dream, I shook my wife awake and told her, ‘Honey, The Spider and the Spectator, it’s real.’ That moment of acknowledgment, and my embrace of the irrational, became the seed of transformation for both myself and the trio.”
With this newfound inspiration, Munkus and Co. set out to actively work against convention and tradition, operating according to no constraints—be that in terms of theme, style, time frames or any other boundaries. “The idea was to do everything in the ‘wrong’ way,” Munkus explains. For five years he did just that, experimenting with a host of instruments and technologies and allowing Sommerlad and Epp to do likewise, so that the act came to resemble not so much a band but an avant garde collaboration where any curiosity could be followed and developed. The result was a full-length album, The Spider and the Spectator.
We’re delighted to share the first single and title track ahead of the record’s release in April. Opening with discordant drum machines, the song falls into a frantic rhythm, the shared vocals surrendering to the flow and motion. Various guitar lines and loops arc across this canvas, the vocals entwining and overlapping into a network of words and phrases, taking on an almost ritualistic edge—distinct energies collected and combined, then offered toward some higher purpose.
The Spider and the Spectator will be released on Subtle Soup Records on the 20th April, so keep an eye on their website. Also, visit the Old Robes website for more information, and the band have a Bandcamp page where you can find their previous release.