A & E Profile: Gavin Robb
By Donna Talarico

Vitals: 5 feet, 8.8 inches tall. 145 lbs. No hair, brown eyes
Name: Gavin Robb
Age: 24
Hometown: Pocono Pines, PA
Year/Major/Any Minors: senior communication studies major

The Beacon: Tell us about Felix Sarco.
Robb: He is a pretentious, critically reviled, postmodern, visual composer and classically trained pianist from Wisconsin. Despite his being indifferent to our musical works, he has offered his compositional talents to act as a mediator of sorts, bringing the band's disjointed movements together to form semi-coherent songs. Long story short, Mr. Sarco works with us through mail correspondence and has offered his pseudonym to use as a band name. We are technically Felix Sarco's Polar Power Manifesto Magnet Supernova.

The Beacon: Tell us about Captain Cromley Legussa.
Robb: He's a fashion savvy, pseudo-Mongoloid and our current singer. Our relationship is religiously based. We're both members of The Church of Mirrors, a sect based around the belief that "God is in the mirror." I met him one day at a ceremony in my bathroom. I looked up from the sink and we just started talking. It was love at first sight. We were finishing each other's sentences and everything. It was perfect timing too. At the time we met, I wasn't really happy with my place in the band, as I was constantly bouncing between "the recording engineer" and "the singer." There was no outlet to look at the music objectively while being so intimately involved with its performance. I told him this and he offered to sing. In context, he was musically more appropriate, so I stepped down. My deep and sincere love of my band mates, as both people and artists, keeps me here, so I'm glad to be a part of this thing, even if it's just recording their albums.

The Beacon: What unexpected should the crowd expect while you are on stage?
Robb: I never have any idea of what to expect at the shows. Sometimes they just play the songs, other times they punt newborn babies into the crowd.

The Beacon: I read on your band bio that you spent three years with the Peace Corp. If that is correct--what was that like? Where did you go, and how did it change you?
Robb: That was Cromley. He talked about it a few times. He claims he went to Botswana to engineer a fresh water supply for a group of tribal natives who were defecating in their drinking water and getting dysentery. He said it was hotter than anyplace on earth and that he never thought he'd get so sick of smoking pot, drinking hallucinogenic wine, and banging on drums, but besides hunting, that's all they did to pass the time. He said that doing anything for three straight years will cure you of the habit, but I'm sure Phish fans will disagree. To be honest, I don't really believe him, and I've told him this before, so I'm free to say it here. He lies compulsively. He has an awful habit of stealing stories from other people's lives, and I think he made this up to justify his use of the "Captain" title.

The Beacon: Like a CD is a blank slate for your music, I can tell your body is a canvas for art too. Tell me about your tattoos.
Robb: Not much to them really. They're more like bumper stickers than body art. Nobody likes them very much. I tried getting a few of my friends to get them with me, but nobody wanted plain English in Times New Roman on their body. They wanted "Japanese writing" or Latin, but I don't speak Latin fluently and I can't read Japanese. I mean, what if the guy writes "jerk off" on my skin and I think it means "valor" or whatever. I don't need "jerk off" written on me; that's redundant.

Cromley liked two of my tattoos and got them after he saw them. We share the word "truth" on our ribs and the mathematical symbol for "nothing" around our wrists. My significance for the "truth" has become sarcastic, as has most of what I say and do nowadays. The idea of wearing something as grey and personal as the abstract concept of "truth" in a black and white, simple text on my chest makes me snicker. And Cromley's a bold faced liar, so I'm glad he got it for irony's sake. I believe that time makes nothing life's only constant, and Cromley thinks that time, and life based around it, makes nothing real, so those are our versions of wristwatches.

The Beacon: What is your favorite place, or type of venue to play? And--what is your dream gig?
Robb: The Scranton Cultural Center shows we've had in the past are "lucid dream gigs." The crowds are always great, 200+. We have total creative freedom as well. We have onstage art displays, film running as we play, and crazy theatrical backgrounds. It is by far, the best depiction of what we do.

The Beacon: Do you ever think that (certain) people are afraid of bands like yours--noise, costumes, etc? If so- what are your thoughts on that?
Robb: Some people are afraid of "not getting it." We blend comedy, drama, subtlety, abrasiveness, progressive composition, dance beats, etc. into the act, so if you dance, you'll be able to dance; if you don't, you'll be entertained by looking at the stage. There's nothing to get, really. It is what it is. The stage antics give a tongue-in-cheek nod to the "glamour" of "rock and roll," but the costumes fall off ten seconds into the first song because they (the band) jump around so...much. I never wore costumes on stage. I tend to think it makes things a little too silly, but I'm guessing they're coming from the standpoint that "losing the costumes" while freaking out is a metaphorical commentary on the costumes we, as people, wear daily.

Musically, we believe in saturating the senses to shut down the thought process with the hope that the listener can act more on feeling than on thought. We spend so much time thinking we forget to feel. A release allows us to review/renew the process. Some people already think less and don't need any help.

The Beacon: Where is the future of rock and roll headed, and more importantly--how are you and your band going change it?
Robb: Cromley put it best. "Rock and roll is a gold shitting Terri Schiavo. What music needs is mercy murder."