GEO bio
Copy I did for Dutch post-punks GEO around debut LP Out Of Body, which got awarded Bandcamp’s Album of the Day. Order the album here.
“Stripped-down minimalist no wave that captivates with its sparse rhythms of a powerhouse rhythm section slashed over with the cheese grater guitars. There is a whiff of this stuff around at the moment but Geo does it so much better than anyone else I have seen. Every instrument is precise and perfect.” — John Robb, Louder Than War
“Geo offer up four extremely groovy and rather weird post-punk tunes that hover between being tightly wound and slightly janky without ever being too bone-rattling. So, you know, classic post-punk.” — Mariana Timony, Bandcamp Daily
Post-punk/no wave oddity Geo are like a sentient slot machine: whatever seems happenstance is actually by design, and the more mismatched the moving parts appear, the more their music starts to make sense. Since the Groningen quartet’s inception in 2019, they have built a framework of skeletal agit-funk, cartoonish chromatics and neoteric art punk vignettes — sketching negative spaces where chaos and cacophony can sound perplexingly catchy. After releasing their esteemed EP in 2021, the band has entered its next creative chapter.
Out of Body — Geo’s long-awaited debut album — is an oblong snow globe utopia where dancing with two left feet is an actual custom. Out on Erste Theke Tontraeger on April 25, 2024 — this collection of songs constitutes material Geo have been writing and performing when they first entered the circuit. After recording the album, the band has changed members — Michiel Klein (guitar) left and bassist Maud van Maarseveen (bass) has been replaced and KJ Braams, who now joins Jorne Visser (vocals/guitar), Gijs Deddens (drums) and Ype Zijlstra (keys, electronics) in the current iteration of Geo.
Out of Body is a document of a past when body and mind were at strange odds with one another. “I struggled quite a bit with depression and sadness at the time,” Visser reveals. “So the lyrics are conversations with myself, because I felt that the music was an outlet for that. I had the opportunity to shout out and address things in a conceptual and creative way, a dialogue with myself that I could externalize. That’s the common thread. Out of Body feels very much like a time capsule, something I have moved on from.” Sentimentality isn’t quite Geo’s forte however. As a matter of fact, Visser professes that the concept of sentiment quite frightens him on calamity-ridden disco punk of “Wu Obst Fas” .
Indeed Geo’s jitterbug, birdbrained post-punk spiels are in the spirit of gung-ho deconstructionists like The Contortionists, The Fall and Gang of Four. On Out of Body, they play emotions out against each other like some kind of absurdist Punch and Judy show. Anti-love anthem “All My Love”, for example, doesn’t treat love like a blessing from the heavens, but a festering sickness eating the song’s protagonist up from the inside if not properly expelled from their system. The song unfolds like a wind-up toy disguised as doomsday device, spiraling down in sinister delirium. “Is Set Free” sounds like a tropical resort gradually enclosed by cracked LCD-screens, as serrated guitars carve through a placid bongo-beat.
On Out of Body Geo take jovial pleasure in hauling the listener to sonic microclimates where the conventional rules of quote unquote ‘pop music’ hold no sway. The puzzling “Caught A Cricket”, for example, has absolutely no qualms impishly lockstepping between anxious neo funk and frenzied orchestral dissonance. “I think a lot of our music revolves around confusing people a little bit,” Visser adds. “I personally check out rather quickly once music becomes too predictable. And I think that happens too often in music. So the twists and turns are there to mislead people, and also maybe make our songs a little bit unpleasant. Because that’s also kind of true to our reality. So we have no problems keeping the listener on their toes.”
As one would suspect, Geo’s music isn’t exactly the product of a bunch of dudes in a rehearsal space jamming shit out. Many tracks on Out of Body are Frankenstein-like experiments: a patchwork of exchanged ideas over a longer distance, with no calculated plan in place on their overall outcome.”That process of writing and developing these songs is also reflected in the fact that Jorne went to live in Amsterdam and the four of us were based in Groningen to rehearse with an idea he sent along. Which allowed for a particular idea to suddenly take a completely different turn,” Zijlstra comments.
As Visser parrots on “Sunglasses”, “being naive is not a luxury”, which is as close to a mission statement as there is for a band making strange non sequitur-packed pop songs. In the land of one-eyed kings, the blind man is free. Which is to say that creating music unshackled from conventional wisdom, logic or individualism makes Geo a band that will shock you out of your system in endlessly fun and perverse ways.
Out of Body keeps that darned carrot dangling on the stick in front of you: it’s a record as maddening as it is exhilarating with its kooky balancing act of melody and discordance. Once these songs infest your body and brain, you will have moved in ways previously deemed unfathomable. Visser: “I always find it interesting to keep the truth somewhere in the middle. I have always struggled with searching for some absolute truth that I can never find. And I think that search seeps through into our music.”
