Lumberob’s Rob Erickson wasn’t a big fan of petting zoos as a kid. “I have a real fear of stillness—like when turkeys are really still and you can’t see which way they’re looking,” says the Brooklyn-based musician, performance artist and teacher. “Then they suddenly do that explosive feather-shake thing, which feels like real evil to me.”
Maybe that’s why the cover of Lumberob’s new Shimmy-Disc LP, Hunter Gather, features a shot of a cute dog swaddled in a beach towel. But it’s hard to say, seeing as so much about Erickson is an absurdist exercise in the inexplicable. In stark contrast to his day job at a public middle school in Manhattan, Lumberob’s stage act began 25 years ago in Austin as an experimental looping project when few people knew what looping was. These days, a Lumberob performance is part improv, part avant-garde performance art, part one-man band, part orchestrated rambling—and there’s nothing “still” about it.
Hunter Gather’s 18 tracks are dispensed with frenzied efficiency, many of them in less than two minutes. “They’re all love songs,” says Erickson. “They’re naughty and silly and arch. The album should be played loud. It’s good workout music, good dance music, good art-making music.”
Speaking of art, the video for the minute-long “Deliciously” is the arresting handiwork of Arturo Baston, a self-taught animator and creator based in Barcelona.
“I’ve been familiar with his work for years,” says Erickson. “I love his look—the color, the tone. It’s a digital form, but it feels so tangible to me. Arturo mistook my lyric ‘holding handles’ for ‘holding candles’—and what a gift … The candles are great, weird, spooky.”
We’re proud to premiere Lumberob’s “Deliciously” video.
—Hobart Rowland
