In Broken English

IBE is a French-American band founded in 2007 by Gregg Anthe (composition, lyrics, vocals and guitar), and formed by YDL (visuals, vjaying), Callie Uleners (vocals, lyrics), and Justine K (bass, backup vocals).

Gregg Anthe (who released 5 LPs, 3 compilations and toured Europe for approximately ten years with his former band, Morthem Vlade Art) and YDL (a painter, performer, film-maker, and VJ whose work has been acknowledged and awarded by many international festivals including: Videoformes, Traverses and Living Videos) elaborated on IBE's structure throughout 2007, experimenting the basis of what would become the balance and alchemy between two unique, strong personal universes. 

Carried by Gregg’s bittersweet compositions and YDL’s illusory universe, the project evokes a landscape: a place where urgent and primitive themes mix and are tinted with cynicism, cynicism to be understood in its primal meaning: critical and romantic. Abrasively rock the world, spin it with pop, visually explore it back to its enchantment. This whole, aiming toward its very purpose: to deepen the stage’s space, image and sound.

In early 2008, Callie Uleners, San Francisco-based, joined the band. With Gregg who lives in Paris, they developed a compulsive long-distance working method, whose fluidity only equals the urgency to create, a daily emulation which exalts its authors and allows each one of them to widen its intuitivity – no parasitical thoughts during the creative process. This common sensitivity, whose freshness is being preserved by the distance, assures the perfect cohesive nature of this whole. 

As for the image, it backs the compositions with an experimental, intimate shiver: each time, spasmodic incrustations of mixed interferences (the color that suddenly intrudes the raw black and white material, acts of violence or endearment that sever from the feint passivity of the main protagonists) come to disturb the suffocating atmosphere in which the characters, mostly a single man, evolve.

So does IBE lift the veil of appearances with subtlety, through direct songwriting and the likely accidental crack in Gregg and Callie’s gorgeous voices. The final arrival of the bassist Justine K roots the band into a solid and mature pop that blackness opacifies without ever burdening it, like Joy Division or the Velvet Underground. Emmanuelle Ferrand (D-Side Magazine)

discographie :

album In Broken English