Record First, Figure Out How to Perform it Later
GENRE: Synth-Punk
HOMETOWN: Brooklyn, NY
ARTISTIC APPROACH: Trial and error songwriting and live arrangements
URL: blackmarble.bandcamp.com
Ty Kube and Chris Stewart, the gents behind the synth-inspired, Brooklyn-based duo Black Marble, never thought they would be in a band together. Or at all.
The pair has only been playing together for a year, but has been good friends for the better part of a decade. Meeting by chance at a bar in the Lower East Side, Kube, who hails from Denver, and Stewart, from Woodbridge, VA, became fast friends because of their mutual passion for the arts. Their friendship developed into a musical partnership somewhat unexpectedly, because as Kube says, “Chris has never really done music before. I have only been in one other band; the fact that we are in a band together is kind of surprising…but good.”
Regardless of their inexperience in the industry, the duo is doing something right. The band signed with independent label Hardly Art before they had even played a show. Found by their demos on SoundCloud, Black Marble was able to release an EP and LP under the Hardly Art label within a few months, as Stewart explains: “The EP that they put out, we re-did it, but honestly it was already ready to go. They had wanted to put out what we had [done] in GarageBand.”
The quality of the music that the band has released online can perhaps be attributed to the group’s primary songwriter Stewart, who says of his writing process:
“I try not to be constrained by what would or would not be possible to do live. My goal is just to write a good song.”
The group’s sound is defined by synthesizers, drum machines and keyboards, and the writing process is “a lot of trial and error,” according to Stewart. When it comes to their live shows, “A lot of our songs, when we play them live, don’t sound exactly the same as what is on the album,” Kube says, because “we sort of figure out, once the song is done, how we are actually going to play it live.”
Black Marble is ready to take their synth-punk sound on the road, and is planning dates both domestically and abroad for the near future.
photo by Ashley Leahy