INTRODUCING: ROMES
Brothers Jacob and Nicolas Bitove make up the dynamic raw sounds of electro-rock outfit ROMES. We caught up with the Ontario duo not long ago as they had recently embarked on their first headline tour following last years wildly successful album SONIC TRASH.
“It was our first time playing anything from SONIC TRASH live so it was a lot of fun bringing those songs to life and sharing that energy with everyone overseas,” Nicolas tells us. “It’s funny because we went from playing about 12 shows over the last five years, to 40 in two months now. We’re loving the opportunity to bring SONIC TRASH to people on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s always so cool to meet people after the shows and talk about life and nerd out about music and gear. Heading out to local bars with people at the shows in Europe became a regular occurrence.”
Sitting somewhere between THE PRODIGY, NINE INCH NAILS and PENDULUM, ROMES have hit somewhere between nostalgia and contemporary so perfectly, it’s infectiously good listening. “That’s all the good stuff we grew up on!” They exclaim. “Originally, we weren’t even trying to write an album – we were just experimenting with creating sounds in unconventional ways in our basement studio. We started getting into a rhythm and having a lot of fun with the process of hooking up drums to modular synthesisers and seeing what results came out of it. Then we started realising that a cohesive sound was emerging and realised without even thinking of it, we were pulling on a lot of the influences from our formative years in the 90s. Our parents introduced us to such a wide spectrum of music when we were young and a lot of that has found its way into our sound – from hip hop to punk to electronic to industrial. We never set out to try and replicate any of it but rather just went back to our roots and the bands that got us into music in the first place. It’s interesting because a lot of people after shows will tell us that our sound has a certain nostalgia factor while at the same time sounding like something they’ve never heard before.”
ROMES fuses the appetite of a live and fresh rock act and the thirst for the fluid cohesion of electronic performance. “We’ve always admired how electronic artists craft a seamless set from start to finish. We’ve never been fans of the whole start song, end song, talk about random shit kind of vibe. So with this SONIC TRASH set we thought, ‘why can’t a rock band take the same approach as electronic artists?’ So our entire show is one continuous set with songs transitioning into one another. We also mash-up a bunch of our tracks live and remix them with some of our favourite jams from BEASTIE BOYS, SEBASTIAN, DAFT PUNK, CHEMICAL BROTHERS, etc.”
The brothers have always had a keen interest in music, and have explored their creativity from a young age. “We both got into music at a very young age and as brothers were fortunate that we got to jam together after school every day. We started playing cover songs and then progressed to recording shitty demos on our parents’ 8-track recorder. It’s been a journey over all these years and our sound keeps evolving.”
The pair have also managed to make their passion for music work in other spaces like video games and cinematic composition. “It’s crazy because since we started truly creating with no expectations, other opportunities started coming our way. For example, we had never even thought about getting into the video game space, and then, from posting our studio experiments online, Jack Wall, who composes the Call of Duty Black Ops series, came across one of the videos and asked us to collaborate on the soundtracks. Then that led to movie score composing work, etc.”
ROMES is evidently self-contained, from the very inception of a track to the mix and mastering to merch. “Honestly, we really enjoy it. Jacob has spent years honing his chops in Ableton to be able to produce, mix, and master everything, and I’ve spent years working in Photoshop and Final Cut working on various graphic design and video projects for other bands. We realised we have the tools to keep everything in-house and doing so makes it easier to stick to our vision and move a lot quicker.” That goes very much into their live sets too. “We’ve got a lot going on behind the scenes in our show as well. For example, in certain sections the drums control the lights and synth via drum triggers. Jacob also has the ability to manipulate and mangle my acoustic drums in real time with custom midi mappings and VST chains we’ve built. It all adds another organic layer and energy on top of everything and keeps things exciting, both for us and the audience.”
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