Tickets on sale Friday 13th November at 10:00.

Robocobra Quartet

“Fugazi meets Mingus” – Drowned in Sound

 “Free floating musical explorers” – Hannah Peel

“A signature sound of jazz-motivated, punk-informed spoken word” – Loud & Quiet”

They say good ideas often start with a joke: the idea of a 100-track album was initially an off-hand remark but very soon the band started writing specifically for “the hundred” as they affectionately called it. Despite being serious about their work, Robocobra Quartet enjoy being playful with their art.

Inspired by the durational art of Marina Abramović, and specifically her memoir Walk Through Walls, Robocobra Quartet set about to create a one hundred track album as a composition in itself.

During the writing process, saxophonist Thibault Barillon began growing petri dishes of fungus at home with a view to create the artwork for the album; this soon became an improvised process in tandem with the music-making, furthering the band’s obsession with the idea of chance.

“We have a studio in an old Linen Mill in Belfast where we write and record, we set it up so that it was always mic’d up and capturing each instrument separately. Most days there would be like 8 hours of useless material, but occasionally the chaos would organise itself into 3 or 4 minutes of something magical, that we luckily had captured.”

Much like the organisms growing in the petri dishes, some of the songs grew into very complex studio productions laboured over for months, such as Haha and Nothing, whereas other tracks, such as Gilded and Ashes Again, were simply moments captured during the writing process – their lives began and ended within just a few minutes.