Robocobra Quartet - Ten Easy Pieces Robocobra Quartet

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. Inspired by the durational art of Marina Abramović, and specifically her memoir Walk Through Walls, Robocobra Quartet set about creating 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 creating 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. Much like the organisms growing in the petri dishes, some of the songs grew into very complex studio productions laboured over for months, whereas others were simply moments captured during the writing process, their lives beginning and ending within just a few minutes.

"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.”

Ten Easy Pieces sees this filtering process pushed farther, cutting the 100 songs down to a 'classic album' format of just 10 songs. “Most big pop albums start with probably around the same amount of demos, pared down to the final tracklist. The only difference is we've shown our working!” says drummer/vocalist Chris W Ryan. The artwork for Ten Easy Pieces builds from the petri dish artwork from the album campaign, showing an organism hat has dried up and finished its life cycle. The title of the album is a reference to a curated exhibition of endurance performance art of the same name by Marina Abramović - a fitting nod to curating down an ambitious project into a bitesize presentation.