Mit ihrem Projekt Snowbeasts loten Robert Galbraith und Elizabeth Virosa die Grenzen zwischen Dark Ambient, Industrial und technoiden Klanglandschaften aus. Aus dem Soloprojekt wurde ein kreatives Duo, das persönliche Erfahrungen, politische Spannungen und rohe Energie in intensive und fesselnde Tracks verwandelt. Im Interview sprechen Rob und Elizabeth über ihre Anfänge, ihr Zusammenspiel und die Vision hinter ihrem aktuellen Album.
Foto: © Mandi Martini
Who is behind Snowbeasts? What made you decide to start the project?
Rob: Snowbeasts was originally my solo Dark Ambient project. It came out of trying to deal with a really rough winter coupled with some health issues. It was initially intended to be a one-off concept album, but it sort of morphed into both mine and Elizabeth’s primary project.
Elizabeth: Rob and I met years ago and started a project together called Pattern Behavior. We would meet up at his studio and work on tracks together. A little later, during a particularly snowy winter in Providence, he started a modular side project called Snowbeasts. I only contributed a bit on the earlier releases, but as we started playing out more and promoting, the two projects folded into each other—it just became too much to keep them separate.
Could you share a bit about your musical journey so far? How did the two of you first come together musically? What is it that connects you? And what do you value most about each other?
Rob: Elizabeth and I met through a mutual friend and discussed working on some music together. We were originally doing a project, Pattern Behavior, but Snowbeasts sort of morphed into our primary project. We were originally doing modular dark ambient music, but there was a turning point with our Instincts album which ended up being heavier downtempo beats. I would say that was one of our first turning points. From there we started mixing some of the more textural elements with techno and industrial beats, which brings us to our current incarnation.
There is a lot connecting us both musically and through our marriage. I feel like we both challenge and push each other in different ways and ultimately we end up complementing each other. So what I value most is that I have an awesome partner who gives me balance and is incredibly patient.
Elizabeth: When I was young, I learned some guitar while I was sick with mono as something to keep me busy, but I ended up focusing on visual arts originally and went to art school. In college, I took some sound art classes and learned about „computer music“—editing sounds and recording using a DAW, and also some hardware like a 4-track tape recorder. I created some sound installations but didn’t go back to making music or sound consistently until years later when I met Rob at a party in NYC and started working on projects together.
In terms of what connects us, we have similar tastes in music and art. The music is what originally brought us together, but our relationship has developed more over time. I value his dedication, precision, technique, skills, and time management. I’m the more „right-brained“ one.
Fotos: © Mandi Martini
If you had to describe your music in terms of not music, what would you say?
Rob: I would have to put it into emotional terms—feelings of anxiety, wonder, loss, and tension.
Elizabeth: Constant energy, raw power exchange, pulsating rhythms inspired by nature and human error.
What themes are you currently drawn to in your work?
Rob: With Dire Days we were dealing with the current situation we are facing in the world—the rise of fascism, loss of bodily autonomy, and the constant waves of change. In previous releases, I feel like we were dealing with more raw emotion and texture. Given the state of things, I felt we needed to make an album coming to grips with everything.
Elizabeth: Powerlessness, Early EBM, AI, Globalism, Tyrants, Patriarchy, Corporate Emperors.
What are you looking for in music? What are the boundaries that you look to explore with music?
Rob: An outlet and a release. I am happiest when I am working on music and a lot of my non-musical time is spent thinking and planning about what I am going to be doing next musically. As for boundaries, first and foremost, I want to push myself—I always want to make sure I am able to accomplish what I want to through sound.
Elizabeth: I look for a balance of good production, emotional awareness and expression, and interesting sounds. I hope to find our own sound. In terms of boundaries, I like to perform live and create a space to share the sound with others. I like that sound is physical and can impact the body and mind.
What is sound to you? When did you first fall in love with sound?
Elizabeth: Sound to me is energy, and it’s hard to say when I fell in love with it. I heard it theorized once that we enjoy drum beats because they remind us of our mother’s heartbeat in the womb, so I guess it would go back to when I was a fetus.
Rob: I see sound as an outlet of expression—this can be both overt and more subconscious. The thing about sound is that it can spark inspiration from very unexpected places. Over the years we have incorporated found sounds into our music—little bits of inspiration we find in our travels.
I first fell in love with sound back in the mid-80s with my Commodore 64. My dad had bought me a musical keyboard overlay that let you play music with it. The C64 had a SID chip in it that was capable of making some fantastic sounds. I think that was the pivotal moment for me.
How are your music pieces created? Where does the impulse to create something come from for you?
Elizabeth: We have a number of hardware synths, apps in our DAW, and noisemakers in the studio. We usually just start playing with something and go from there.
Rob: We usually start by playing around with one of the keyboards or drum machines and start building up layers. A track idea may come from juxtaposing two different sound sources or making a sound with a particular piece of gear. It could be a situation where one of us is just playing in the studio and the other one decides to capture it in our DAW. Everything we do gets recorded into Ableton, so we can chop it up, process, and arrange.
Fotos: © Angela Dimock
How do your surroundings impact your art?
Rob: They play a huge part in our art. I feel like Snowbeasts was created in part by the inspiration of living in Providence. We were on vacation in Key West years back and both came to the realization that we wouldn’t be able to make the same music there.
Elizabeth: Surroundings are particularly important for this project as we tend to write in the winter, so the mood and atmosphere are definitely influences.
What artistic influences, outside of music, have had a significant influence on how you approach your art?
Rob: Film plays a huge role, in particular the work of Stanley Kubrick, Dario Argento, and David Lynch. Films that don’t fill in all the details and let your imagination do some of the work.
Elizabeth: I studied performance art and really dug the Dada movement. I’ve also been getting into Butoh a bit. Both of these movements have already influenced some of the darkwave, new wave, and post-punk music that has influenced us.
Your new album Dire Days comes out in September. Could you take us through the journey from the very first spark of inspiration to the finished album? In what ways did the songs transform over time, and were there particular moments that truly put your creativity to the test?
Elizabeth: I focused on writing lyrics more in this release than previously, so that was my challenge in this one. I really wanted to get some words out that are hard to express in day-to-day conversations or social media. I had some songs that just did not fit with the tracks we started to put together—it was a bit like a puzzle.
Rob: Dire Days came together in a couple of months and its creation was a bit of a blur. I had been traveling a ton in my last job and was starting to feel more settled in, ready to work on music towards the end of last year. I feel like more than ever the songs stayed relatively close to the original intent and didn’t need to be transformed very much. When we were talking about making this album, we approached it a bit differently than previous releases—we wanted to treat each song as a potential single and we wanted to push Elizabeth’s vocals more to the front.
As we were operating on a creative roll, nothing really felt forced or as if we were being put to the test. We had the occasional remixing of a track or multiple takes on vocals, but everything felt smooth.
How important is the visual side of Snowbeasts to you? How does the visual aspect relate to and reflect your music?
Rob: I feel like it is extremely important to us. We always try to align ourselves with artists who can complement us visually, and we have been very lucky with the artists that we have worked with so far—Wolf Luman, Noah Hirka, Simon Paul. Simon Paul was able to capture what we were trying to get across perfectly with Dire Days.
Elizabeth: I have been thinking about lighting a lot more than I used to. We have been playing with solid color washes during performances and simple but effective approaches to lighting to create a dreamscape.
How would you describe the world you are trying to create during your performances?
Rob: Tapping into emotions and visceral responses. Getting people to dance!
Elizabeth: Dreamscape, fever dream, horrorscape—but you still want to dance despite it.
What’s next for you? What are you most looking forward to?
Rob: Looking forward to bringing these tracks out live and starting to work on the next album!
Elizabeth: Looking forward to playing out more!
Foto: © Derek Rush
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