A Symbiosis of Sound!

Have you even been to Rothko? It’s on a dark street on the Lower East Side. I went to see the Mobius Band, originally a Massachusetts based trio that now calls Brooklyn it’s home (A move up if one asks me). I wondered what Rothko was named after and I came up a Mark Rothko, US painter born in Latvia as Marcus Rothkovich (1903-1970). I searched for the meaning of the Mobius band and learned that a Mobius Strip, named after German mathematician August F. Mobius (1790-1868), is a surface with one continuous side formed by joining the ends of a rectangular strip after twisting one end through 180 degrees. Take a moment to digest that. Now, Mark Rothko was famous for being a leading figure in color-field painting, painting hazy seemingly floating rectangles of color. If this hasn’t blown your mind yet, then one has to imagine listening to the electro rock sounds, full of blips and bleeps of the Mobius Band at Rothko. Painting and twisting rectangles, squares, triangles and all sorts of different shapes out of sound that would have made both August F. Mobius and Mark Rothko jump up and down. I’m quite certain that they were both there in spirit; Mobius and Rothko were world-renowned partiers, dancing and bopping to the fast paced rock songs driven by a standard drum set and an electronic drum pad played by Noam Schatz. At one point Schatz’s drum seat broke and he played the whole second half of the song standing up, ala early French Kicks. Guitarist Ben Sterling and Bassist Peter Sax switch off singing for the band and also platoon on the various electronic sound making machines. A fun band that we’ll be sure to hear more from in the future watch out for the Mobius, gigging a lot of shows with Orthodox rapper Matisyahu as they go across the country spreading their gospel of mathematics and sound.

Tags:   french kicks, live pop, mobious band, rothko

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Posted on 9/8/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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