Premiere: Lumberob’s “Blessence”: song and dance

Rob Erickson pushes an envelope

Rob Erickson has been teaching humanities and drama in New York City schools for over a decade. Before that, with an MFA in Playwriting, he worked in the English Department at Brooklyn College. Erickson’s first serious band was Adult Rodeo with wife Stephanie Mankins; they signed with Shimmy-Disc in 1998 and released two albums with the label and two more on their own over the course of six years.

Lumberob, Erickson’s alter ego, boasts a less straightforward resumé.

This guy spent high school hanging out, smoking pot, listening to albums at an enlightened record store and playing in high school bands. Lumberob began as a solo looping concept project in late 1999 in Austin, TX, before looping was a genre. It was a simple a vocal show running a mic run through an Octave pedal and a Fuzz Factory into an AKAI Headrush looper. The work was raw and spastic, illegible, direct, live and always improvised.

Meanwhile, Adult Rodeo was touring the West Coast and Europe with Jad Fair & Kramer. Fair and Erickson got to goofing and a Jad Fair & Lumberob side show emerged from their soundcheck antics. Growing from a scrappy sound project to a fully realized performance art extravagance, Lumberob had a good thing going as a working performance artist in the early 2000s, often playing variety bills at clubs and theaters, even publishing one performance’s script as a book.

Lumberob—or maybe Rob Erickson—told Elmore a bit about his new work:

“‘Blessence’ is a smooth little Lumberob jammer, stumbling heavy and sweet. Structure is all suspension, waiting for the clarity of the lyric… I AM DANGER. There’s plenty to worry about. Shannon Plumb and I have made a lovely dance, an instructive dance showing how to move to the Blessence groove. It is a smooth little jammer, stumbling heavy and sweet. It carves out your heart with its sharp edge. I AM DANGER.”