Quibbler

Shan Tamarindo began recording music at a young age under the name Quibbler. "To get where Quibbler comes from, you kindof have to understand my whole story. I was born in New Zealand. My parents were very eccentric people, and we traveled all over. We spent lots of time in Nepal, Vietnam, and Amsterdam. My father was a bicycle mechanic and we never had any money, so we always went to places he was sure there would be lots of work. I never went to school, so my mother educated me. She taught me to read from music magazines, and bought me a tape recorder when I was 9 so I could hear the strange accent she was trying to drill out of me. I spent all of my practice time making up songs, and I think the tinny, cheap recorder really influenced where I would go with my sound."

Quibbler was first noticed after self releasing and album and EP exclusively on cassette. While not hugely prolific Quibbler gave interviews to countless blogs, websites and alternative papers. "When I was 18 I moved to New York, and got a job in a used record store. I worked for a few years but mainly spent a lot of time immersed in the local scene, working on my style. I wanted a sound that would really fill a room' but with space, you know? I wanted a spare, expansive sound, I wanted to really hear the resonance in myself. About this time I met Hax."

Seemingly on the strength of reputation and blog buzz Quibbler signed a deal with Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Records, and entered the studio. "I know people think we're lo-fi, but everything on this album is so precise. It took us 16 months to record, and we were still mixing right up until it went to press. We used all analog equipment, with an emphasis on vintage and not reproduction, which was hard to find. For the first few months we did more shopping than writing or recording. When we were looking for a sound a lot of the time Hax had to crack open the equipment and work on it, actually solder wires and stuff. Sometimes we'd burn out the equipment and have to scrap it completely and start over. There's so much reverb on this record its hard to hear what I'm saying, and I like that."

She is known for her forward thinking aesthetic. "We wanted the right look. We had to think of what people would be doing when the album came out, and then try to predict what was 6 months beyond that, because we didn't want to just get lost in the mix. And the music is that way too. We wanted beachy but not garage, and we're definately shoe gaze but not chill wave. I was listening to a lot of witch house when I wrote the album, but I wanted to go for a singer songwriter approach to space beach dub. We talked a lot about it."

The album was released to good press. "We were so happy with how it turned out. When I put it on my turntable, and that's really the way to hear it, after spending so much time crafting it for all those spaces between the sound you need an analog format that will let you hear that space between the sound, anyway when I put it on I hear the bass bounce off the corner of the room and reverb back, and that plays off of the guitar echo and the perfect hollow snare sound we got. It's like another song going on in between all the parts we're playing. When we play it out it changes in each room and really even for each crowd, because so much of the sound is how the sound bounces around. It's amazing, I might sound conceited but I think I can in this case, I honestly feel this is one of the most groundbreaking pieces of music made since the advent of the internet. I used to go to the Museum of Television and Radio when I lived in New York, and watch film of Marlene Dietrich, and Odetta, and Patsy Cline and all those icons, and I'm ready to be one of them now."

And then the radio station played the song, and it sounded like everything else.