The Band
Members
There are three members of Rhode Island. Everyone swaps around a lot, and what happens live probably isn’t what happens on records, but roughly speaking this is what we all do:
Dave - Guitar, Vocals
Jeff - Drums
Will - Synths, Vocals
Rhode Island coalesced in the Summer of 2002, from the remnants of another band. Together with drummer Tom, they played gigs and recorded ep’s and the like. By 2008, Rhode Island started to move in a different direction. With each member in a different city (sometimes country), the band met up sporadically to record various ideas they had without Tom, either playing drums/percussion themselves or programming drum beats. This eventually led to the album Landmarks, Junctions, Etc (2008). The record, by and large, is about Leeds, which was kind of being rebuilt/vandalised. The band sent people polaroids of the city, if they wanted them. The album received good reviews.
In a bid to play live again, the trio then produced a stripped down EP, the Suits EP (2008), utilising programmed beats, ultra-portable one-note synths, bass and electric guitar that could be fully recreated in a gig. It was recorded, more or less, in a couple of days in Newcastle. Accordingly, they played a handful of autumn gigs in Leeds and Manchester with this new format. In January 2009 they released Laputa/Buoy, two tracks that take the format employed in the Suits EP to its logical conclusion (they added a bit of reverb).
They then spent 2009 sporadically writing, rehearsing, gigging and recording an album called The Third Person (Dave on guitar, Jeff on Drums, Will on synths). In fact, it took so long, they released an EP of cover versions called Taphonomy EP halfway through for a bit of, y’know, fun. The album came out at the beginning of 2010. It features proper instruments and songs and multiple allusions to dying and to Switzerland. Broadly, the album is about the final moments of consciousness, repeated infinitely, death a living spectre. Euthanasia, powerlessness, ambivalence. Those kinds of things. There was an offshoot EP called Internecine EP which quickly followed.
Rhode Island are currently trying to learn how to play live properly, which involves learning some of our really-quite-big back catalogue. We are also developing our own language, with which we will be able to communicate in an incredibly nuanced yet rapid manner during practises. Although hopefully a time-saver in the long run, we’re finding that developing a bespoke language from scratch is itself vastly time-consuming. Something of a paradox!
