Lobe | uk

Ian Hartley/ Lobe Biography
Since his early days ('88) at the Pelican club in Aberdeen, Ian Hartley has been experimenting
with sound, texture and melody. A graduate of Edinburgh's Blue Room scene he has remained in
that city while never indulging it's dominant "techno" aesthetic. Indeed from the earliest days
there was something different about Lobe. Although his sound is machine derived it has never
been about the machines on which it was created. Perhaps this has to do with his solid refusal to
make anything which is not 100 percent Lobe in order to make a quick buck from his music. In
fact he has retained his "career" as a psychiatric nurse a fact that grounds the man (he is modesty
incarnate) and tempers his reponse to the praise which has been heaped upon him from certain
quarters.

From his first release in 1995 the placebo 12" on swim~ everything which has engaged and
captivated his small but dedicated band of admirers was present, underneath those modest
exteriors lies music of great depth and beauty which somehow retains the lightest of touches.
Mark Gage (vapourspace/cusp) played out the record so many times as to wear out the grooves
and was heard to remark on hearing the man live "just how does he do that?" The broadcaster
and writer Desmond Hill comissioned a track for his theme tune. The writer Jon Savage was an
early convert, who like many of the devotees rates Lobe as amongst the best (if not the best) that
swim has to offer.

An album followed in 1996, the self titled lobe. Understated yet passionate the album gained new
converts. Satrist and radio broadcaster extrordinaire Graham Duff dubbed the disc "the album of
the 90's", quite a statement coming from a self-confessed music obsessive; Neil Tennant was an
unlikely convert. One of the most amusing comments came from an American radio DJ who
described the album as "the best album to fuck to...ever!!" Perhaps not quite the accolade Ian was
looking for but one which demonstrates that the music will work in a diverse number of settings!
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https://myspace.com/lobeuk

http://www.discogs.com/artist/3739-Lobe

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Electronic musician & psychiatric nurse Ian Hartley, carves therapeutic melodic equilibrium between sanity & insanity. This is his story.

“The whole stigma against the mentally ill means that people suffer in silence for such a long time because they can’t go to a doctor & say ‘I feel I’m going mad.’ You do that & you end up being admitted to a unit in hospital somewhere. They are still completely normal, they’re not sub-human or anything. It’s just maybe, in their own lives, their histories, it all came too soon.”

“Creativity is therapeutic - absolutely, totally. Where life seems to get narrower, this is escapism. You get pissed off & you can get stuck into the music. Sometimes it can make you even more stressed out if it doesn't go anywhere. Usually though, just out of the blue, something will turn up, it will just happen. Then it’s great. That’s the best thing. When there’s all this stuff building in your head, it’s just nice to let those ideas & emotions out.”

“A lot of the time I don’t know why I'm doing it or where it's coming from. I don’t consciously try & write a song for any specific environment, but there is a space for what I’m doing, I think. It doesn’t sound like anyone else, though there is a familiarity to it. People need to sit down & listen to it though, as it’s not immediately forceful & grabbing.”

“First of all it was me & my brother playing together with two guitars & no extras. Even in punk music without a drum kit it was difficult, so my brother persuaded me to buy a drum machine. The whole Acid House thing came to Aberdeen a bit later than where it hit everybody else. I got into the techno stuff at the beginning of the ‘90s. Then my brother moved down from Aberdeen to attend university, which meant I could only use the drum machine for one month every four. So I moved down to Edinburgh.”

“I still use the one drum machine, a Roland R5. It's pretty basic & it’s falling apart, but within the last twelve months I’ve steadily built up tracks... I'm writing, not necessarily for the album though, just writing. I’ll make a couple of tracks around an idea. Then when that’s done, I'll look to do something else. It's all centred around the same kind of sound. With the limited equipment, that’s the only way to work. I just find... I feel as though I haven't really started yet. I’ve a better idea now of the kind of sound I want than I did a year ago but it’s not healthy to know exactly what sound you want. You’ve got to keep going, changing. The overall sound is quite melancholy, quite emotional. I suppose there’s something that I'm trying to convey but I’m not sure what it is.”

(written and published 1997)

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