From the world comes Strobe Talbot. With them, they bring four distinct musical personalities that intersect and synthesize uniquely. They are all supremely excited indeed to share their music and their collective story with you.
Strobe Talbot has worked very hard to exist. The group itself is a study in contradictions - members that live thousands of miles apart, extremely disparate musical histories within the group (spanning three months to thirty years), and a music that eschews the members’ traditionally challenging and more-adventurous leanings in favor of a sincere and enthusiastic exploration of ever-truer individualistic pop sensibilities.
Strobe Talbot has got four members: Jad Fair (vocals) Mick Hobbs (guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals) Benb Gallaher (drums, keyboards, vocals) Andy Fisher (bass)
Here's a bit about each
of those members:
Jad Fair by Benb Gallaher :
Leader of indie-rock founders Half Japanese, Jad Fair has turned out an exceedingly prolific seventy albums with a number of different outfits since Half Japanese's 1977 debut EP, Calling All Girls. With his brother David, Jad haphazardly revolutionized two movements: punk and post-punk. Half Japanese was (and still is) a group whose approach to making music was unaffected and unrefined in its passion, resulting in some of the most enthralling, formula-free rock music EVER made.
Jad's devout adherence to artistic self-sufficiency has earned him great kudos among fans and press, and his idiosyncratic majesty has landed him in a variety of projects with a virtual who's-who of independent rock music: Maureen Tucker, John Zorn, Daniel Johnston, Jason Willett, J Mascis, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, and Teenage Fanclub comprise but a smattering of such involvements.
In addition to being heavily involved with music, Jad is also a renowned visual artist, with exhibitions having taken place all over Europe, Australia, and the United States. His personality translates as well and as authentically to visual media as it does to music. He's got his own web site: http://www.jadfair.com
Jad lives in Texas with his wife, Patty, and lots of pets.
Mick Hobbs by Benb Gallaher
Mick is the primary author of music in Strobe Talbot. A native of England (where he currently resides), Mick's musical history is as wide-ranging as Jad's, if not quite as discographically vast. His years of compositions, many of them pop masterpieces, are precious secrets unintentionally kept.
Mick was a founding member of prescient post-punk ensemble Family Fodder in the late 1970s, and his path soon diverged into increasingly ambitious and forward-looking territory. Mick worked as a guitarist, bassist, vocalist, recordist, sundryist (?), and/or drummer with innumerable groups and musicians during the 1980s and 1990s, including The Work (with Henry Cow's Tim Hodgkinson), The Kalahari Surfers (with ReR's Chris Cutler), The Momes, his own Officer!, The Orchestre Murphy, et. al. This music is at once cerebral and visceral, and Mick's greatest talent is to execute unusual and groundbreaking ideas while maintaining both his personality and his engagement to listeners. The austerity of Mick's pedigree, however, does not serve to alter the fact that he is capable of kicking some serious shit as demanded by musical situations.
The subject is also an extraordinary visual/conceptual artist. He has designed several record covers in his day - most notably (in the author's opinion) the eponymous debut by Baltimore group The Can Openers. Mick lives in London, England with no pets. (The author suggests that he is very kind and an eligible bachelor.)
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