Kordan has a Longing for what's to come

Brooklyn-based dream-pop trio excited for what's ahead

By Catherine McCarthy
Published: November 30th, 2010 | 7:00am

A long and winding path spanning thousands of miles and nearly a decade brought the members of Brooklyn-based dream-pop trio Kordan to this point in time. It’s a time full of promise, with the autumn release of their debut full-length, The Longing (Last Bummer), garnering attention and critical praise for the lush, hallucinatory qualities it evokes.

“It’s a whole storyline set in Japan, or maybe a large metropolis somewhere in the near future. It’s all hazy,” says vocalist and guitarist Arthur Eisele. “It’s a very melancholic soundtrack to a movie that hasn’t been done yet, that just exists in our minds.”

“It’s more like a scene than an entire storyline. A scene of a person just waking up and coming out of somewhere, reliving what they just did, waiting for somebody,” adds bassist Gabriel “Gabo” Rodriguez. “Something happened that they’re not sure of, and they’re reliving that.”

Eisele, Rodriguez, and vocalist and keyboardist Liz Reboyras met as undergrads in San Juan at the University of Puerto Rico. “The capital is big enough that it can hold an arts scene,” says Eisele, “but small enough that we all knew each other in some way.” The music scene that brought these three together is very different from the one they operate within now. Reboyras remembers Eisele as a drum and bass DJ in what he calls a “rave travel Mecca of the world.”

After graduation, all three left the vibrant party scene of San Juan for the U.S. Reboyras moved to San Francisco, Rodriguez to Washington, D.C., and Eisele to Newark, New Jersey. “A good airport, and if you want to get robbed, it’s a good place to go,” he says. A month after being robbed at gunpoint, Eisele moved to Brooklyn, which also beckoned to Reboyras and Rodriguez. Soon, the three were writing music.

“I think we’re all coming in from different mental channels here,” says Eisele. “We have epic battles of musical taste,” adds Rodriguez. “We all kind of have to come to an agreement where all the things that we like converge into one,” says Reboyras. From an electronica-heavy past, Rodriguez has come to love bands as diverse as Wild Nothings, Yo La Tengo, and the Cure. Reminiscing about past band obsessions, Reboyras remembers a longstanding infatuation with Ladytron, and the band’s live drummer, Jake Chudnow of Slowest Runner, recalls that he has an “official Smashing Pumpkins fan number. I got the Smashing Pumpkins documentary, If All Goes Wrong, and it actually really scared me. I boxed it up, threw it in the back of my closet, put on Siamese Dream, and tried to forget it.” Eisele still loves drum’n’bass legends Staxx and Skynet. “They wrote the soundtrack to the future. It’s like a sad robot thinking about his future and he sees a darkness at the end, a wise old cyborg wondering, ‘What have we become? Machines, or something else?’”

Unlike that wistful cyborg’s vision of what’s to come, Kordan’s future looks bright. After playing in Los Angeles and New York this autumn, the band is taking a quick break before getting to work on demos for a second album, which will have a “more raw sound,” according to Eisele. A tour is in the future, but where would the band ideally like to play? “We’re big fans of Tokyo, as you may have noticed,” says Reboyras. “We could just tour around Japan for two years.” All three would love to play a show in San Juan, and Germany’s also on the list. But as for the places they want to visit, Eisele says, “Somehow you don’t want to see the actual place you want to go, because then the reality destroys what you’ve created in your mind.”

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Kordan official site

Kordan MySpace page

Last Bummer Records