Band of the Week: Mobius Band

Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Fun Fact: The photo of the apple-eating woman gracing the cover of Mobius Band’s latest, Heaven, was shot by John Vanderslice.
Why It's Worth Watching: “Circuit-bent keyboards” help create the band’s unique pop and electronica-infused sound.
For Fans Of: The French Kicks, Dismemberment Plan, The Postal Service

The term “circuit-bent pop songs” might not have infiltrated the music industry lexicon just yet, but Ben Sterling, Peter Sax and Noam Schatz, the trio comprising Mobius Band, might just popularize it, thanks in part to a few re-wired toy keyboards.

“We played a show in Minneapolis a couple years ago, and this guy onstage had these two $20 Yamaha keyboards that had all these weird switches on them,” Sterling recalls. “They sounded amazing.” Fascinated with the idea, Schatz spent months holed up in rural Massachusetts, tinkering with run-down Casio keyboards while Sterling and Sax worked on new material in Brooklyn.

“The next time [Schatz] came down to the city he brought like five keyboards with him that he had turned into these weird Frankenstein creations,” Sterling says. “So sound-wise, that was definitely a huge focus for [Heaven] because we’re always interested in new sounds, and it was a way to get them that didn’t involve computers. It made the writing process feel more like playing music rather than slowly creating it with the computer.”

What resulted was Heaven, the band’s second full-length and first for Misra records. Chock full of these circuit-bent gems that buzz and hum along, the record teems with impossible-to-duplicate sounds, danceable beats and hook-laden choruses.

The tinkered-with keyboards helped expand upon the sound of the group’s earlier work, which has always been a unique fusion of pop and electronic elements. The guys first got their start back in 2000 after graduating from Wesleyan University. From there, they ducked away to the tiny town of Shutesberry, Mass., where they recorded and self-released two EPs.

“I think it was really good for us to be separated [in Shutesberry],” Sterling says. “It was just really easy to live out there. We would play all the time and experiment with things.”

Mobius Band soon signed with indie imprint Ghostly International, and Sterling and Sax relocated to Brooklyn where the group teamed up with producer Peter Katis for 2005’s City vs. Country EP and first full-length, The Loving Sounds of Static. A rigorous touring schedule followed, as did a tumultuous turn of events, which included the death of Schatz’s father and Sterling’s break-up with his girlfriend. Once the tour wrapped up, the band spent 19 months readying new material. This time opting to self-produce the album as they did on their first EPs, Sterling says he and his bandmates are happy with the end result and ready to show off their work.

“When we stopped touring, we stopped being visible at all,” he says. “I kind of felt like we were really under the radar, and now we’re peeking our head out a little bit.”

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