KX FM 104.7 Live In Studio: Until The Ribbon Breaks

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UK genre-bending trio Until The Ribbon Breaks recently relocated to Los Angeles and made the trip down to our Pearl St. studio for a live in-studio performance and interview. Frontman Pete Lawrie-Winfield chatted with Morning show host Tyler Russell about their “genreless” sound, drawing inspiration from film & more before the guys played a stunning four-track set.

Starting as multi-instrumentalist/producer Pete Lawrie-Winfield’s solo project in 2012, Until The Ribbon Breaks burst onto the scene in the summer of 2013 with impressive singles “Pressure” and “2025“. Multi-instrumentalist James Gordon & drummer Elliot Wall have since joined up, and the trio released their debut album, A Lesson Unlearnt, in January to overwhelmingly positive reviews. UTRB, as the group’s known on Twitter, has a sound that’s impossible to put in a box, seamlessly fusing electronic, rock, pop & hip-hop flavors to create sharply produced tracks. As Pete tells Tyler, the group’s unconventional name comes from the idea that “when you were a kid and you would make a cassette playlist or mixtape..and it didn’t matter that it jumped around from genre to genre…whatever you loved, the idea being that you would play it and play it until the ribbon broke, so the fact that we don’t have a genre is definitely intentional”. In light of Pete’s background in film, another medium that the ribbon breaking is meant to represent is a VHS tape, and he talks to Tyler about how projecting an image or video on a screen helps him in the songwriting process. One line from the album that he says stands out to him is from “Back to The Stars”, which begins with, “I was born with my back to the stars / Turn me over, I’d like to see”.

Their inventive use of samples could be considered one of UTRB’s defining features, and they opened their in-studio set with a vocal snippet of Robert Frost’s 1916 poem, “The Road Not Taken“.