In part because they primarily played basement and all-ages shows, Terrior Bute were never a high-profile band, but they made an impression on anybody who saw them. They started out in the mid-’00s as a gangly trio of high school kids playing spastic synth-punk, and there was something at once awkward and confident about them. Sometimes they wore matching Devo-esque jumpsuits. Occasionally singer Jeff Graupner would catch a nosebleed, and the band would keep performing anyway, even as blood poured over his shirt and on to his keyboard. You don’t forget a sight like that.
Nearly a decade later, a lot has changed for the band. It’s been a long time since they’ve worn the jumpsuits, and Graupner’s nose doesn’t bleed as often these days. Graupner relocated to Chicago years ago but the band carried on. Even after their other synth player Ryan Coogan left the band, Graupner and drummer Henry Chern continued making music together, under the new moniker (ORB). “We felt the need to change the band name out of respect to Ryan,” Graupner says. “We weren’t Terrior Bute anymore, but in a way we still were. So we essentially shortened the name to (ORB), which are the letters found in the middle of Terrior Bute, and we slapped some parentheses around them.”
Through all the changes, the band’s sound has been remarkably consistent. Graupner and Chern are still committed to the same lo-fi combination of drums and synthesizers they honed in high school. “When Henry and I play together, we only know how to make the music we make,” Graupner says. “We each learned our instruments by playing in Terrior Bute, and we hardly ever play with other people. This is just what we do.”
Like Terrior Bute before them, (ORB) haven’t been especially prolific in the studio. For the last two years they’ve been performing with just one recorded song to their name, the single “Whole Wide World.” They’ll expand that output nine-fold soon, however, when they release their debut album Inside Voices on Gloss Records on Thursday, Aug. 6.
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Recorded with former Catacombz drummer Casey Marnocha, the album marks a proggy turn for the band, revolving around a loose narrative about the conflicting voices in a man’s head. The seven-minute fantasia “Pinch” is a symphonic rock opera distilled to just two instruments, while “It’s In Within” plays like that band’s version of a Rush ripper. Underscoring Inside Voices’ prog motifs, the cassette version of the album will include fold-out art inspired by Roger Dean’s grandiose covers for bands like Yes and Asia. Even (ORB)’s truncated, one-syllable moniker is, in a small way, a nod to prog conventions.
“We wouldn’t be considered prog to somebody who just listens to prog, but that spirit and creative drive is in what we do,” Graupner says. “It’s kind of like how people who were real into punk would get offended when they saw us and say, ‘This isn’t punk.’ It was punk in the sense that we were 15-year-olds breaking synthesizers while we were trying to play them.”
(ORB) plays an album release show Friday, Aug. 14 at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn with Dogs in Ecstasy and NO/NO.
