JABON

JABON is the long-running solo alias of American recording engineer, producer and experimental musician Scott Colburn. Although Colburn is widely known for his work behind the mixing desk with artists such as Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Sun City Girls, Mudhoney and many others, JABON has always been the outlet where he explored his own ideas without commercial expectations or stylistic limits. The project began in 1984 while he was studying at Indiana University, growing out of an interest in tape manipulation, improvised performance, found sound, spoken word and experimental filmmaking.

 
The earliest JABON recordings were assembled using homemade tape loops, extended instrumental improvisations and fragments of poetry, comedy and surreal dialogue. Colburn has described spending long sessions recording himself playing drums, then overdubbing bass, guitars and electronics before editing the recordings into finished pieces. Rather than building songs in a traditional way, he treated the studio as an instrument, cutting, rearranging and reshaping performances into strange sonic collages. During the project's first decade he played only a handful of live shows, preferring to focus on recording and experimentation. 

 
JABON draws inspiration from an unusually broad range of sources. Early punk groups such as Black Flag and Greg Ginn's instrumental band Gone sat alongside the surreal pop of The Residents, the damaged psychedelic sound of Chrome, and the electronic experiments of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick and Charles Ives. Tape-trading culture during the 1980s also introduced Colburn to industrial, noise and avant-garde artists including Controlled Bleeding, Negativland and Whitehouse, influences that found their way into JABON's constantly shifting mix of dark ambient textures, electronic music, absurd humour and experimental composition. 

 
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, JABON released a steady stream of cassette and independent recordings including 'Autograft', 'Atonement', 'As Fess', 'Abode Stinesville', 'Abscission', 'Adder's Tongue', 'Ambulatory Paranoia' and 'Autoguilt'. These recordings were largely self-produced, with Colburn handling the writing, performance, recording and mixing himself. The project remained mostly underground, circulating through cassette culture, experimental music networks and small independent labels rather than the conventional music industry. 

 
After spending much of the late 1990s and early 2000s concentrating on engineering and production work, Colburn revived JABON as an active performing project in 2009. Live performances became elaborate multimedia events featuring costumes, projected films, spoken-word passages and theatrical props alongside dense layers of electronics and manipulated sound. The performances balanced eerie atmospheres with an offbeat sense of humour, a combination Colburn has described as "avant garde ambient disco comedy." Around the same period he began recording regular improvisations and expanding the catalogue with new albums and audiovisual works. 

 
As both JABON and Scott Colburn, he has continued to move freely between experimental composition, sound design, restoration work, production and live performance. His recording credits span underground rock, experimental electronics, folk, drone, world music and contemporary composition, while JABON remains the space where those influences are filtered into surreal, unpredictable recordings that combine electronic experimentation, collage techniques, ambient music, performance art and a distinctly playful sense of the absurd.