Pity the band that doesn’t realize it’s breaking up. When Nicholas Sanborn moved from Milwaukee to Durham, N.C., a few years back, he had every intention of returning to his electronic trio Cedar AV someday, even if only in a limited capacity, and his bandmates Nathaniel Zabriskie and Erik Schoster believed it would happen, too. They continued rehearsing without Sanborn, keeping the project warm for him for whenever he found a free week or two to return to it.
But as the months passed, the distance sunk in, and when Sanborn’s new electronic pop duo Sylvan Esso began finding an audience—first around Durham and then nationally, bringing Sanborn the success he never found in Milwaukee—all parties began to acknowledge the obvious: There was no Cedar AV anymore. Zabriskie and Schoster rechristened the project Geodes and began touring as a duo this spring, playing almost entirely improvised sets of electronic music.
As band origin stories go, that one is frankly uninspiring. After all, no band wants to be defined by the absence of a member. But projects have a way of taking on their own character. This spring Geodes began documenting their evolution in real time, committing themselves to releasing a new online EP every month, and you can plot the point where the band broke free from Cedar AV’s shadow: July’s effervescent Drums with Drones EP, their first since recruiting drummer Jess Lemont.
“She transformed the project,” Schoster says of the band’s newest member. “For me, adding her into the group was what really defined Geodes as its own thing. With Nate and I playing as a duo it was almost just like Cedar AV without Nick, which was very fun, but it didn’t feel like its own thing.”
Schoster now refers to Geodes as “a weird jazz band,” and there’s some foundation for that. Schoster and Lemont both come from jazz backgrounds, and there are moments on the trio’s new Storm Minerals EP when all the digital patter falls into an orderly, rhythmic groove. The jazz is more implied than overt, but the genre’s familiar patterns ground the group’s freeform tendencies.
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While Lemont’s addition has reshaped Geodes’ sound, it hasn’t much changed their process. As before, they work almost entirely through improvisation. Schoster notes that the less boundaries or structure they impose on themselves, the happier they are with the end result.
Both Zabriskie and Schoster play computers, but they each take opposite approaches to the instrument. A keyboardist by habit, Zabriskie concentrates on inputting instruments through the computer, including melodica, harmonica and contact microphone, then processing their sounds. Meanwhile, Schoster prefers to work from scratch, programming music in the Python and MIDI coding languages.
“To me programming is kind of a solution to the problem of how to approach the computer as an instrument,” he says. “When I started working on this software system I was very conscious of trying to approach it on its own terms. What’s the native way of working on a computer? By programming it. My day job is as a programmer, so ironically my process as a musician is the same as my process at work, but to me it really is a joy. I think of it as this little orchestra I can control.”
Noting that programming a computer on stage doesn’t necessarily make for the most thrilling live show, Schoster credits Lemont for lending excitement to the group’s performances.
“It’s funny,” he says. “Two dudes with a computer: Who wants to see that? But two dudes with a computer and a drummer? That’s a little more interesting.”
Stream Geodes’ Storm Minerals EP below.
