Otobo – An Xperience Interview

Otobo – An Xperience Interview – by Sketchy Hubris.

OTOBO is a Capital Region band that can’t easily be pigeonholed by genre. So we will just call them a three-piece band, consisting of Josh Thorsey (guitar), Justin Barre (guitar and bass), and Brandon Rutski (drums).

RRX: OTOBO. Where does that name come from?

JT: I don’t know if you want to leave the mystery open to interpretation. It sounds like a word and you know it; it is sort of an inside scoop. Part of me likes the open-to-interpretation part.

JB: If you decide to put the word that it’s based on in, it’s about the versatility of the music.

RRX: I like that; we will keep it a mystery.

RRX: Let’s go on to genres. I personally hate them, but we need a place to start.

BR: I think the best way to explain our band is “three-piece experimental.” We do everything across the spectrum; a lot of rock influence, electronic influence, a lot of songwriter influence. The albums that we make and the way we build our set are by feel. So it’s kind of hard to put a label on that because it goes so many places. Sometimes very soft, sometimes it is intended to be ethereal, and sometimes it is intended to blow your shoes off.

JT: There is a really big difference between our recorded albums and what you see when you come to a show. Our recordings are cinematic, while our live shows are more full-throttle.

JB: The balance of keeping it three-piece and broad (even with our effects) live, and doing the opposite in the studio and letting the computer be its own instrument. The second record has a lot more editing and computer sounds that we are not going to do live. We’ve taken songs from that record and totally played with them and reworked them for a live rock outfit.

JT: When people ask what kind of music we play, I just started saying to people, ‘What kind of genres do you like?” And they list a couple and I say, “Yeah all those.”

RRX: About the recording process—what did you learn from the first album to the second? I found the first one more experimental.

JT: If you had the musical spectrum in a giant lake, the first record was in the back corner of the lake where the big fish hide. The second album was, like, in between there and the middle of the lake. The middle of the lake being pop culture and music.

JB: The first record Jay and I made was fully developed in a span of two months. The second record had ideas from songs written five years prior, even recorded. If anything, the second record is a major collage.

BR: That record was written in a totally different way. The short history from the end of the first record: they asked me if I would play drums on a song that would end the record. We recorded the back half of the song, “Blood.” We recorded the version and it was too big for the album. Unanimously we liked the song, but it was too big. So, we decided it was going to be the next thing.

JB: We are always listening to what the song wants, putting our egos to the side, and responding to the song.

RRX: What’s the longest live gig you’ve played?

BR: We’ve played three-hour sets before and showed up with no plan.

JB: Mostly improv, no plan.

JT: We didn’t call ourselves OTOBO, though. We called ourselves Captain Greg’s Catfish Tone Machine.

BR: We pretty much played all day to a bunch of kids; we’re talking five-year-olds.

JT: It was at a fall festival market at a plant nursery in Latham.

RRX: What’s next?

JT: We have a lot in mind.

BR: We have a record we are working on now. We have shows this year that are setting up the songs that will be on our next release. At the same time, we are working as a team and recording other bands. We are trying to bridge into producing other bands, because it took us a long time to figure out how to communicate and figure out how to record the right way, and we would like to help bring that to other bands. Come to us.

JB: It’s something we talked about the past few months. We are conceptualizing it and it is certainly something we want to do. The times is now.

RRX: What is your favorite ice cream?

JT: I’m gonna be that guy and go classic: f*$king vanilla.

BR: Are we going strictly flavor? Because I have a favorite ice cream specifically: Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra.

JB: It’s between Stewart’s Mousse Trail and a simple Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.

OTOBO is performing as the headliner at the Kinderhook Carnival & Community Day on Saturday, June 8, at 8 p.m. at the Town of Kinderhook’s Volunteer Park.

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