Roommate (band)

Roommate is a band from Chicago, IL.


History

Roommate began as a solo music project of Kent Lambert in 2000. He had just moved from Iowa City to Brooklyn and started recording music in his apartment. In 2001, he relocated to Chicago and self-released the Celebs EP. In 2004, Roommate re-emerged as a live band. Work on the full-length Songs the Animals Taught Us began soon thereafter, and the album was self-released in the summer of 2005. A wide release on the Plug Research label followed in the spring of 2006 and was supported with a European tour and a few shows around the United States. Production on the New Steam EP began in late 2006 and the band recorded steadily through the completion of its second full-length album. We Were Enchanted was released in April 2008 on Plug Research and Shrug Records and supported with shows in the Netherlands and the American Midwest.

For several years members of the live band changed based on availability, playing instruments such as musical saw, banjo, violin, theremin, Buchla Music Box, and bassoon, as well as hand percussion and traditional rock instruments. In recent years the band has stabilized into a quartet of Lambert, Gillian Lisée (Fruit Bats, Califone), Seth Vanek (Tiny Cover Band, THIN HYMNS), and Sam Wagster (Cairo Gang, The Father Costume, Fruit Bats). Roommate's third album Guilty Rainbow was released on the Chicago's Antephonic label in the spring of 2011. Tours through the Eastern and West Coast United States followed shortly after. Guilty Rainbow won praise from music writers such as Collin Anderson of Tiny Mix Tapes, who called it "one of those rare albums that starts out great and gets better." [1] The band's fourth album MAKE LIKE was released by Chicago's Strange Weather Records on June 23, 2015.

Members

The current lineup includes:

Occasional and past participants include Gerard Barreto (bass/sound engineering), Nick Broste (trombone, sound engineering), Amy Cimini (viola), Reid Coker (guitar), Tim Daisy (drums), Devin Davis (drums, theremin), Erica Dicker (violin), Jim Duffy (drums), Tom Comerford (guitar), Anton Hatwich (bass), Cody Hennesy (guitar, programming), Mercedes Landazuri (banjo), Justin Petertil (guitar), Daniel Schneider (guitar), Dewayne Slightweight aka Lee Relvas (bells, vocals), Evelyn Weston (musical saw), and Katherine Young (bassoon). During a short tour in The Netherlands in May 2008, Lambert performed as Roommate with a Netherlands-based backing band of Bart de Kroon (guitar, banjo, Moog), Melvin Wevers (bass) and Sebastiaan Janssen (drums) from Dutch singer Pien Feith's band.

Discography
  • Celebs EP, CD, self-released (December 2001, re-released with modified artwork by Fresh Produce in February 2006)
  • "Duyster", various artists compilation, 2 x CD, Play it Again Sam (March 2005, released for the fifth anniversary of the Belgian radio program Duyster; Roommate's "RP (Forget the metaphors)" was selected for disc one, "Duyster.Classics")
  • Songs the Animals Taught Us, CD, self-released (July 2005, re-released with modified artwork by Plug Research in April 2006)
  • New Steam EP, Plug Research - download only (February 2007)
  • New Steam EP, 10" vinyl on Shrug Records (June 2007)
  • We Were Enchanted CD, Plug Research (April 2008)
  • We Were Enchanted vinyl LP, Shrug Records (April 2008)
  • Guilty Rainbow digital/vinyl, Antephonic Records (March 2011)
gollark: Sure? I would move it to beside <#733816666089062511> but mobile.
gollark: Heavpoot is to be declared SCP-3125-A with immediate effect.
gollark: My tape download program now supports downloading big files without splitting them, via range requests, assuming they're served from a server which supports it: https://pastebin.com/LW9RFpmY (do `web2tape https://url.whatever range`)
gollark: Here is a similar thing for JSON. Note that it delegates out to an external JSON library for string escaping.```luafunction safe_json_serialize(x, prev) local t = type(x) if t == "number" then if x ~= x or x <= -math.huge or x >= math.huge then return tostring(x) end return string.format("%.14g", x) elseif t == "string" then return json.encode(x) elseif t == "table" then prev = prev or {} local as_array = true local max = 0 for k in pairs(x) do if type(k) ~= "number" then as_array = false break end if k > max then max = k end end if as_array then for i = 1, max do if x[i] == nil then as_array = false break end end end if as_array then local res = {} for i, v in ipairs(x) do table.insert(res, safe_json_serialize(v)) end return "["..table.concat(res, ",").."]" else local res = {} for k, v in pairs(x) do table.insert(res, json.encode(tostring(k)) .. ":" .. safe_json_serialize(v)) end return "{"..table.concat(res, ",").."}" end elseif t == "boolean" then return tostring(x) elseif x == nil then return "null" else return json.encode(tostring(x)) endend```
gollark: My tape shuffler thing from a while ago got changed round a bit. Apparently there's some demand for it, so I've improved the metadata format and written some documentation for it, and made the encoder work better by using file metadata instead of filenames and running tasks in parallel so it's much faster. The slightly updated code and docs are here: https://pastebin.com/SPyr8jrh. There are also people working on alternative playback/encoding software for the format for some reason.

References
  1. "Tiny Mixtapes Review: Roommate - Guilty Rainbow". tinymixtapes.com. Retrieved 2011-08-08.
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