"Spontaneity is probably the one thing you can say that characterizes Gelbison" says David Galafassi, drummer of this new and exciting four piece from Bondi, NSW. "A lot of the time we’ll just have an idea and all of us will come up with our ideas and we’ll just record them rather than sit down and work them out. We all put down dozens of ideas and stuff like that, then parts get cold and parts get written and bits get used and then the song develops. It’s just an evolution for us."
Gelbison are a new group on the local music scene. "Edo and I met initially about two years ago and at the time I was playing with another band and we were playing in the Glenworth valley festival, up near Gosford in the countryside. We kinda met and hung out for a few days at the festival and just had a jam a few weeks later, it was horrible but for some reason we kept doing it. So Edo and I played together for a few months before we decided to do anything active and then we looked for a bass player. Nadav [the keyboard player] and Edo [guitarist] are brothers; Nadav came later in the piece."
Gelbison released their astounding debut self-titled CD last year, however if it wasn’t for Gomez’s Ian Ball this masterpiece might never have seen daylight. "We weren’t planing to record the EP at all" remembers David. "We played a gig and the guys from Gomez came along to the gig cause we met them a few months earlier and invited them along to the show and Ian, the guitarist, for some reason saw something in what we were doing at that first gig, which was woeful, but he said we gotta record it…and that’s what we did a few days later. We shacked up in Edo and Nadav’s Dad’s place and took over and recorded some tracks. One track from the EP, ‘Running from the ground’ was already written, we demoed one or two other tracks, we recorded ‘Running from the ground’ and then everything else was kind of in early stages of development so we developed them really quickly. Mostly through just experimenting, putting different tracks down and ending up with what you heard on the EP.”
Those who have heard Gelbison’s debut EP may get a bit of a surprise when they hear the new single as it has a much heavier feel than the previous tracks on offer. ”It’s an interesting track ‘Metal Detector’, when you get your hands on the record, which probably wont be for a few months, you’ll realize that every track is very different. ‘Metal Detector’ is probably the most refined if you will, the most produced.”
The new single also features Ben Lee playing additional bass on the track ‘Heart Attack five’ “He and Edo are old friends; they went to school together” said David. “He was just around one night and we were just messing around jamming and we put down that track and since that first recording a lot of the stuff was just recorded one night late as a demo and we never expected to use it but a lot of it was really kind of cool so we put some new stuff onto some old stuff.”
The single closes with a 15 minute epic in ‘Fate (Part 1)’ “We’ve got loads of tracks like that that we’ve done. Basically the way we did that, when we were in England between finishing our tour with Gomez and finishing the record we stayed in this house in Brighten, which is south of London and each night we did these extended jams recording the whole thing and just improvising and allowing it to mold itself and allowing it to mold itself and allowing the instruments to react to one other. So we’ve got several of those ambient tracks which are all kind of really interesting in their own ways. It may be ‘Fate part two’ or it may be something different. The track’s actually initially about 80 minutes long and it’s entirely improvised. All four of us going onto one track each on a digital recorder and doing whatever we wanted, whether it was a microphone doing percussive sounds or guitar sounds or keyboards going through effects.”
Both Gelbison’s self-titled EP and single ‘Metal Detector’ are out now. The single is being released through Virgin through the bands own label Cheap Lapels. This will be followed by their yet to be titled debut album in early 2003.