Quintessential Octopus
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States | Established. Jan 01, 2012
Music
Press
Don’t look now, but there’s a whole indie-pop scene mushrooming—sometimes literally out of the bedrooms of New Orleans, but, more often than not, from the minds of transplants who came here as part of the post-K boho diaspora.
David Sigler and Joe Ceponis, for example, met in Montgomery, Alabama and made their way southwest, musical pioneers settling in the area that would best feed their oddness. Originally pairing up to create loops for performers, the result was so good they kept it all to themselves, creating instead an interesting mix of Modest Mouse’s nervous joy and TV on the Radio’s musical self-seduction, quavering falsettos and all.
They rarely waste time, opening with some inscrutable white-boy funk on tracks like “Washo” and “Meese,” then suddenly exploding into fusillades of squirrely guitar leads and fat rock chords before taking a quick right turn into a wall—ending all the tracks in about three minutes, ostensibly before they have a chance to take full shape.
And yet it’s surprisingly catchy for anti-pop, with big grooves and lyrical fragments that constantly pull you up short, as if they were afraid you might actually start dancing and lose your cool detachment. “Gasoline” is the hit—“You make the best of us now / And drag the rest of us down,” the duo accuse over a jerky lockstep—but when they chill out, as on the trilogy that makes up the middle of the record with “Close to the Wire,” “Swing,” and “On and Gone,” they practically sound profound.
Are they? With a musical makeup like this, it’s probably better they keeps that to themselves.
By: Robert Fontenot - Offbeat Magazine
Discography
Mother (2014)
Tall Chord China Interval (2013)
Froggy Style (2012)
The Quintessential Octopus (2011)
http://quintessentialoctopus.squarespace.com/archives/
Photos
Bio
The Quintessential Octopus began as a songwriting partnership between
David Sigler and Joe Ceponis in 2004 under the direction of Douglas
Back, fretted instruments instructor at Baldwin Arts & Academics
Magnet School in Montgomery, AL. Throughout their education in tenor
banjo and classical guitar, they began performing as the Rubber Band
with fellow Montgomery natives Harrison Wallace on bass and Alan Cheng
on keyboard. After a short stint of performances in Montgomery, the duo
disbanded to separate states in order to pursue higher education; David
to Columbus State University for classical guitar training, and Joe to
New Orleans for audio engineering training. After a bevy of successful
recording sessions at Loyola Recording Studios, Sigler and Ceponis
reunited in New Orleans to develop the Quintessential Octopus in January of 2012.
At first, recordings were not enough to inspire a full-throttled
performance of the new material, and after recording three EP's in the
next year with two different drummers, the pair decided that hiring
drummers for live performances was too taxing on the creative
environment of the material. Many alternatives were considered before
deciding to move the former bass player, Joe, to drum and vocal duty,
and convert David into a full-fledged loop machine consisting of vocals,
guitar, and bass. Originally, the idea was to live-produce songs for
an audience based on guitar and bass loops, a combination that built on
three separate channels to affect an ultimately enormous sound. After
much trial-and-error, new songs began to develop that could actually
surpass any one, isolated experience hearing the music; the replay value
became inherent to the songwriting process, and the beginnings of Mother began to take shape as a necessary evolution to what had become an inspiring formula for new compositions.
It took many hours of servile restaurant work and cold-hard gigging to fund the recording and production of the Octopus' debut, but with the crucial assistance of King Benny's House of Hits in
Houston, TX, the album was cut in just one week, and production was
able to wrap up before the end of April. Due in part to a wonderful
community of musicians and the burgeoning pop experiment scene in New
Orleans, Sigler and Ceponis have successfully released their first
full-length album (Mother) on May 22'nd in
both their hometown of Montgomery, AL and their new home, New Orleans,
LA. Though still without a record label, the pair have already sold out
of their first batch of 100 copies and plan on reprinting many more in
the coming weeks; and if the coming summer proves at least as busy as
the last, there will be new shows in new cities until it's time for new
songs to get made. Until then, they'll keep you posted.
Band Members
Links
