Stefen Robinson is in the middle of a pitched battle on the dance floor at Open End Gallery, doing his part to help raise money for the local Raizel Performances troupe. A remix of the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” pumps out of the sound system, and he and his rival–both wearing workout clothes that’d make Richard Simmons proud–shuffle, grind, lunge, and flail. Robinson busts out one of his big moves: he leaps into the air and crosses his legs Indian style, then lands hard and starts bouncing on his ass across the floor. He’s too hopped up on adrenaline to feel any pain now, but he’ll be sore in a couple days. He’ll also end up losing the competition.
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Outlandish antics like this notwithstanding, the 23-year-old Robinson is also a serious musician, if not exactly a straight-faced one. He’s earned a bit of local notoriety for his sacrifice-your-body dance-off style and for his street performances, usually downtown or on the lakefront, where he improvises on a drop-tuned mandolin run through a battery-powered practice amp with a percussionist called Foul Mouth Tommy. But he’s better known as the man behind Yea Big, an experimental hip-hop project whose debut album, The Wind That Blows the Robot’s Arms, comes out Tuesday on Jib Door, the new dance and hip-hop imprint of local label Locust Music. (Locust proper specializes in avant-folk and sound art, with a catalog that includes releases by Josephine Foster, Matmos, Henry Flynt, and Richard Bishop of the Sun City Girls.) Robinson isn’t an MC, and nobody raps on the Yea Big album–instead its old-school hip-hop beats and atomized drum samples give heft and momentum to a skittering, glitchy, lovingly crafted collage that combines cinematic digital soundscapes, field recordings, processed snippets of dialogue, and even chopped-up, barely recognizable mandolin patterns. One track is pieced together mainly from manipulated clips of his friends’ laughter.
At around the same time he first heard Jim O’Rourke–specifically the ambient acoustic album Bad Timing. “It totally changed the way I thought about making recordings. It reminded me of really shitty stuff I was making on tape in high school,” he says, laughing. “I’m not trying to say I was making stuff that was like Jim O’Rourke when I was 14, but it just reminded me of what I was trying to do. And I thought to myself, ‘People make records like this? You can do this and make a living?’”
Robinson is already involved in several other recording projects–he’s playing mandolin and laptop in a long-distance duo called Geographer with drummer Brad Breeck of LA noise rockers the Mae Shi and collaborating with Chicago MC Kid Static, who’s also a keyboardist in the Cankles. He’s remixed the Kill the Vultures track “Moonshine” for a Jib Door 12-inch due this summer, and he’s working on an electric-mandolin arrangement of the Drifters’ 1960 hit “I Count the Tears,” which he’ll perform at Open End in March to accompany a piece by Raizel Performances choreographer Meghann Wilkinson.
Where: Francisco House, 1951 N. Francisco
