Ebu Gogo: Exploring the Imaginary Worlds

“We all have undiagnosed ADD.”

Photo by Ara Ghajanian

So says Justin Abene, bassist for Ebu Gogo. It’s almost midnight on Sunday, May 18^th, and the band has just finished playing a set at Club Hell. I am interviewing them, or trying to. It’s a bit like herding cats.

If you’ve heard Ebu Gogo, you probably aren’t surprised by Justin’s observation. For the past two years, this Providence-based band has been making instrumental, hyper-frantic tunes influenced by the music of the band members’ childhood: eight-bit video game themes and the soundtracks to eighties action-adventure-sci-fi movies. The resulting sound is an impressive collection of high-energy, infectious songs that the band crafted as an aural accompaniment to imagined scenes and stories that developed while they were writing the music. Like the film soundtracks that inspire them, Ebu Gogo’s songs convey action and emotion in a direct, inherently recognizable musical short-hand. It’s a fun, bizarre, and (despite the band’s protestations) utterly original sound, as their nomination for “Best Genre-Defying Act” in this year’s Providence Phoenix music poll reflects.

                           
Photo by Ara Ghajanian                                Photo by Ara Ghajanian

Ebu Gogo is a stripped-down trio of top-notch musicians: Justin on the bass, Gavin Castleton on keyboards, and Brendan Bell on the drums. Compared to many other bands, their gear is almost minimalist: Justin doesn’t use effects on his bass guitar, the drum kit is compact, and the band never uses microphones, even on the rare occasions that they address the crowd. The decision to keep the instruments to a minimum was very conscious, according to Gavin. All of the band’s members were previously in Providence band Gruvis Malt, and their experiences touring in that outfit informed their current, minimized set-up. Gavin explains that they “came from a band that was huge, and that toured with a bunch of equipment, and that was very stressful and had a lot of people involved, it was like an entourage…. [So] everything has to be small for touring….”

Perhaps most striking is the lack of that key ingredient in almost every band: the guitar. Actually, Justin is quite skilled at guitar, but he never felt comfortable with the guitarist’s role: “What I didn’t like about the role of guitar in rock bands, is the solo. I hate fucking soloing. I hate it. It’s like ‘me, me, me’….” While there are no solos in Ebu Gogo’s music, Justin brings a guitarist’s sensibility to his role as the bass player in that he plays all over the fret board and tends to follow Gavin, rather than Brendan, closely. He likes the fact that this project forces him to “find the best of both worlds.”

All of Ebu Gogo’s members are charged with having to play dual roles. According to Gavin, when the band “first started writing, we realized that we wanted to be able to have a big sound with as few people as possible….[M]usically, it’s important for every member to use both limbs all the time, so that it sounds like six people playing.” This explains the only exception to the “minimal instrument” rule, Gavin’s two keyboards.

Live, the band plays wearing huge white snowboarding goggles, and they sometimes sport orange haz-mat suits (they’ve thought about getting more elaborate costumes, but haven’t found anything that they feel fits them quite right yet). Justin stands in the center, flanked on his right by Gavin and on his left by Brendan, both of whom play facing each other. Eye contact is crucial, and you can see Gavin conducting with his facial expressions at certain points, alternately grimacing and beaming as they navigate through their set of tight, dynamic, breathlessly-paced songs. Justin occasionally gyrates in a Muppet-like fashion, bending his upper-body from side to side in time with the music, but this band isn’t interested in jumping around on-stage, and their faces and hands supply almost all of the movement. Justin loves the fact that their faces are so expressive, enthusing that “I like it when everything’s contorted.”

Ebu Gogo began playing out a little over two years ago. One of their first gigs was supplying the music for a tricycle race at the Steelyard’s annual outdoor summer dance party and carnival in 2006, which Gavin claims fit the band “better than any show we’ve ever played.” Their first album, Chase Scenes 1-14, came out later that year. The album is aptly titled, as the music has an adrenaline-fueled, kinetic feel.

Several of the songs written for the tricycle race, including “Torch of the Olympiad” and “Training Montage,” appear on their follow-up album, Worlds, which came out in the fall of 2007. The concept behind Worlds developed as the band was writing the music (they write collectively in one room, a process Gavin describes as “33%, 33%, 33% exactly, and the extra one percent…”). As they wrote, the band began to notice, as Gavin puts it, that “there were clusters of songs. We’ll write a huge chunk of music, hours and hours of music, and then we’ll break down songs, and we’ll go, ‘well, that’s kind of a surf song, that’s a surf song, that’s a surf song’…so we started realizing they were in clusters of threes and twos, and Brendan was like, ‘Yo, this should be called Worlds,’ and each one is like a different area. So we had Waterworld, Robotworld, [which is] like a sci-fi world, forest groves, [and] DNA music like inner space. So this was a collection of worlds.” The songs are instrumental accounts of adventures within these worlds. Gavin describes the music as “talk[ing] in scenes” and says that the band feels that “if we could animate what we’re seeing behind this music, it would make perfect sense.” Justin elaborates: “Not always the storyline comes first. It kind of develops at the same time [as the music].”

In terms of their influences, the band thinks of themselves as “stealing” from eighties film soundtracks such as The Goonies and Better off Dead; they also cite Danny Elfman’s oeuvre as a huge inspiration. Because the band members all had an eighties childhood, they share a common pop-cultural pool of reference; Gavin describes it as an era which might never “happen again. We were of age at the exact time when people were making…adventure movies. It was like, all of a sudden, they were catering to our age group, [all] at once. We were very lucky, and it was so good for our creativity.” Regarding the often-observed video game sound, all of the members are quick to point out that while they grew up playing Nintendo eight-bit games, there was no conscious decision to make their music sound that way; instead, it was a natural, almost subconscious influence.

Still, they all agree that young gamers instantly identify with Ebu Gogo’s music, probably because they recognize the music’s story-telling elements and creation of imaginary worlds. The audiences that get them the most, according to Gavin, consist of “young kids. Like really young kids…we played a show on a beach in Narragansett that we thought was going to be a wash-out, and it ended up being one of the greatest shows we’ve ever played…it was sunset, and it was these young high school kids, and they freaked out. They were acting out all the parts the way we hear them. They knew exactly: ‘the hero parts are hero parts’…it really turned out to be the coolest show. The cops came at the very end, there were flashlights and headlights, and we had to bounce. It was kind of like the beach scene in Lost Boys.”

Currently, Ebu Gogo’s line-up is somewhat in flux. Brendan, who creates all of their artwork, is pursuing a degree in graphic design at UMASS-Dartmouth, so they recruited Chase Leonard of Providence band Cowgirl as their touring drummer for the summer. When asked to comment on the differences Chase brings to the band’s sound, he and Brendan interrupt each other in telling me that the other is a superior drummer. Chase insists that “Brendan Bell is the best drummer in the world. I have big shoes to fill that I cannot fill, and I mess up every song…” Brendan cuts in: “He’s a better drummer….He plays the parts how I would have imagined [them], like how my brain tells me to play them, but I can’t actually physically do it, so he’s actually like me on a different level. It’s very fun to watch him play, because he’s actually reinterpreting the parts in the way they were first interpreted.” Chase was involved in some of the writing process, and his style, while noticeably different from Brendan’s in some ways (he tends to do more rolling fills), does the job nicely; in spite of his assertions to the contrary, he is more than up to the task.

Photo by Ara Ghajanian

For now, Ebu Gogo is focusing on promoting Worlds and getting more gigs for their summer tour. Presently, they aren’t in a position to write because of their touring schedule, Brendan’s preoccupation with school, and Justin’s and Gavin’s permanent residences in Brooklyn and Oregon, respectively. Still, Gavin is thinking about the next album, which he wants to include sequels and “threequels” to songs from both Worlds and Chase Scenes 1-14.

For right now, though, one of the band’s primary concerns is remaining faithful to its founding ethos: to enjoy making music. Gavin says that they all “realized that if you hold onto, and make it always a priority…and defend it literally to the band’s death if you have to, the success is actually tenfold…I actually think that bands that maintain that and defend it, they actually end up doing way better than other bands, both financially and their headspace is way better, their music is better, it’s amazing…it’s always the bands you see just smiling and they kind of forget that the audience is there, and I always feel that people are more drawn to that, because it seems more honest….I know way more bands that are miserable than bands that are psyched to just be playing.” With a candor that is both surprising and refreshing in this era of seen-it-all hipsterism, Gavin insists that it’s “the bands that remember to stay happy and to stay friends” that triumph in the end.

Ebu Gogo’s albums Chase Scenes 1-14 and Worlds are available at the Integers Only On-line Store at: http://www.integersonly.com/store.
For more information, visit http://www.myspace.com/ebugogoband and www.ebugogo.net.