• Robocobra Quartet – Music for all Occasions

    November 15, 2016 - By 

    Take some seedy post-punk jazzy brass, heavy anchored basslines, sporadic nuanced drum fills, and the expressive vocal stylings of the beat generation’s slam poets and you’re left with a vaguely accurate depiction of Belfast’s own Robocobra Quartet. Music for all Occasions is a fascinatingly fierce attack on the Irish music scene. The nine track collection is refreshingly ambitious and entirely bold throughout, with wandering variations of song length, style, and approach. It’s a very complete record designed to be listened to and appreciated from beginning to end. Lead single ‘Correct’ opens the record and immediately sets the tone for everything…

  • Stream: Robocobra Quartet – Correct

    September 13, 2016 - By 

    There was a while there that the would-be implication that we were receiving some sort of financial injection from Belfast’s Robocobra Quartet to regularly fly the flag of their sonic wares wouldn’t have been entirely without reasoning.  After all, a quick search on TTA reveals that we have shared news specifically about the Chris Ryan-fronted project at least a dozen times in the space of a year. Frankly, normally, that kind of thing would border on – if not positively encroach – overkill, were they not such a consistently intriguing proposition. As we bide our time for their long-awaited cheque to clear (disclaimer: we jest), the…

  • The Record: Robocobra Quartet

    February 1, 2016 - By 

    In the latest installment of The Record, we eavesdrop and follow-up on the recording of ‘Kikazaru’, the superb new single from Belfast’s Robocobra Quartet. Photos by Colm Laverty. Hi Chris. ‘Kikazaru’ is the third “part” of the three-wise-monkeys songs you’ve written and recorded. Can you shed some light on the thematic/conceptual narrative threading the three installments? Chris Ryan (drums/vocals): It’s pretty loose. The lyrics were leaning that way for this collection of three songs and so the concept came in retrospect. It’s not strict by any means. For me, it helps not to get too lost in the process of…

  • The Thin Air’s Top 50 Irish Releases of 2015 (40-31)

    December 17, 2015 - By 

    Following on from Monday’s first installment, we continue our countdown of our Top 50 Irish Releases of 2015, featuring glorious returns, new-fangled heroes. Go here to check out 50-41. 40. Lakker – Tundra “You should listen to it loudly, and try to get swept away by it.” So aptly concluded Pitchfork’s review of Tundra, the second album – and debut R&S full-length release – from Berlin-based Dublin electronic duo Lakker in a decade. Released back in May, it proved an immersive ten-track release inspired by No U-Turn Records, Arvo Part, Merzbow and early Human League. Now that’s a dinner party we’d pay good money to…

  • Watch: Robocobra Quartet – Witch Hunt (Live)

    November 30, 2015 - By 

    From the release of their BOMBEP EP back in April, unveiling double-single Iwazaru/Mizaru in October and several memorable shows in Belfast and further afield, it’s safe to say 2015 has been something of a breakthrough year for Robocobra Quartet. A quick scan through our copious posts on the Chris Ryan-fronted band – before and after featuring them as one of our 15 For ’15 – reveals that we’ve called them: chamber punk, jazz-inflected rap-punk, rapjazz-punk, jazz-rap-punk, jazz-punk and (our current personal favourite) “four-piece”. At this juncture, then, it’s say to safe we’ve reached a descriptor Endgame when it comes to even flirting with the idea of summing up…

  • Watch: Robocobra Quartet – Iwazaru

    September 18, 2015 - By 

    Set to be released on lathe cut 7″ via Smalltown America on October 16, ‘Iwazaru/Mizaru’ is the latest double-single by Belfast’s Robocobra Quartet, a band who have grown in several leaps and bounds since first coming to our attention at a Battle of the Bands competition in the city’s Pavilion Bar last July. Accompanied by a skilfully enshrouded video by Sarah Plunkett, the former track is yet another rapt and ruminating slab of sorcerous jazz-noise from the Chris Ryan-fronted band, further revealing the heterogeneous prestige of their ever intrepid craft. Check out ‘Mizaru’ here, pre-order the release here and check out forthcoming RQ tour dates…

  • Premiere: Robocobra Quartet – Mizaru

    August 13, 2015 - By 

    Set for their first touring traipse to the UK next month, Belfast-based jazz-punk quartet Robocobra Quartet will also make their debut Electric Picnic appearance in Co. Laois at the start of next month. Do your very best not to miss them if you’re bound there this year. “Lyrically exploring two of the three proverbial ‘wise monkeys'”, the latest self-produced release from the Chris Ryan-fronted band, ‘Iwazaru/Mizaru’, “finds the personal tangled with the social. This comes in the form of Mizaru’s melancholic re-appropriation of an MP’s 1932 speech and Iwazaru’s self-deprecating look at “speaking no evil” that brashly pairs a lyrical call-back…

  • Track Record: Chris Ryan (Robocobra Quartet)

    June 29, 2015 - By 

    If you were to put us on the spot and ask us, “Which Thin Air feature do you enjoy the most?” we’d almost certainly say Track Record.  Next up to select and discuss some of their all-time favourite records is Chris Ryan, frontman with Belfast-based band (just “band” – we’ve used up all our high-falutin descriptors for these guys) Robocobra Quartet. Punk rock ahoy. Photos by Colm Laverty. Sound of Ruby – From Under The Sands of the Desert EP (Tian An Men 89) Saudi Arabia’s answer to Butthole Surfers. Sound of Ruby are one of my favourite bands of all time…

  • Robocobra Quartet – Bomber EP

    April 16, 2015 - By 

    In the quest for the new sound, the path is one paved with ambitious intentions and fraught with admirable failed experiments and laughable attempts at the avant garde. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is a terrible album that forces the listener to reconsider what they might constitute as real music, while Lulu is an album where James Hetfield feels it appropriate to yell “I am the table”, while Lou Reed’s withered husk struggles to sing some Burrowsian tripe. Both of these releases are burying their fingers in the earth, digging for something and coming up with dirty fingers. There are…

  • Premiere: Robocobra Quartet – Wicker Bar

    April 14, 2015 - By 

    Set for release on April 21, Bomber by Belfast’s Robocobra Quartet captures a band whose brilliantly burgeoning sound gets more engrossing and self-assured with each release. Following on the heels of agog lead single ”80-88′, the brief but burrowing ‘Wicker Bar’ is a more inward-looking, abstracted affair, the band’s drummer/vocalist Chris Ryan meditating on backwashed thoughts and distant scenes, relaying beat-inflected stylings over dancing sax and a floating, spectral vocal ensemble courtesy of Patrick Gardiner. Sub-titled “four songs about three people, two novels, a failed assassination attempt and a volunteer-run community arts space” the EP was recorded by Ryan at Belfast’s Start Together…