The strangest things can be found in the suburbs.

 

They tell me they're only giving me this cocktail (a Manhattan made with a vermouth whose name I can't pronounce) so I'll write something complimentary, but from the crimson velvet armchair I'm sitting in, Stripmall Architecture becomes more unknowable with every sip. It's hard to grasp what they're aiming at, musically, even when they tell me directly how much they adore the electronic music that came out of late-seventies England: John Foxx, Cabaret Voltaire, Chris & Cosey, Tubeway Army. Theirs is a world rendered in black and white on a round-cornered, soft-filtered TV screen and it is their own.

 

I traveled nearly thirty minutes north of San Francisco, to meet husband and wife duo Ryan and Rebecca Coseboom, who live in a house that was built in 1960 which they've stocked full of vintage synthesizers from the 1970's and 80's. As the low crackle of vinyl floated from their hi-fi, I learned that Ryan spent his summers as a kid sleeping on a futon thrown onto a floor covered in patch cables connecting his father's synthesizers and that Rebecca spent afternoons in a dusty car singing along with her mother to the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. It's almost too easy to say that Rebecca warms up Ryan's cold, synthetic songs with her sumptuous voice and impressionistic words. It's too easy, but it's also too true.

 

As adults, the pair have lived outside the city for more years than they lived within it. This is a fact that has colored their point of view and has made them feel like outsiders. Their house is nestled into a verdant Marin County hillside and they count amongst their neighbors DJ Shadow and mad synth collector Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto. It is from this remove that Stripmall Architecture operate in near isolation, perfecting their tracks and collaborating with/remixing iconoclastic artists like Depeche Mode, UNKLE, John Cale, Low and many others.

 

Of course, the Cosebooms are laser-focused on their own material and it is on this level that they should be appraised. Live, they are a powerful force and on record, they demand the listener's full attention. Will the world listen?

 

- Alistair Woodcock, June 2014

 

Photo: Don Joslin