Artist Profile: Ebbb

Photo Credit— Holly Whitaker

Ebbb began merely as a Pandemic-spawned idea of producer Lev Ceylan, but that vision has continually evolved and folded in upon itself, and with their debut record Shallow Hits, the UK-based electronic trio has found its stride, etching out wavering emotional canvases across an ever-expanding sonic range.

Ceylan’s musical journey began in Munich, his hometown. He didn’t have much exposure to music as a child. In fact, he never picked up an instrument or truly thought about music seriously until he was 16, when one of his friends picked up the guitar for himself. Ceylan was entranced.

He later earned an apprenticeship at the Munich Philharmonic Hall, which then exposed the young musician to the orchestral possibilities of music, and as his obsession grew, so did his technical understanding. He spent years in Munich being exposed to rock and jazz and becoming more adept both as an instrumentalist and as a producer. By the time his apprenticeship ended, Ceylan knew he wanted to pursue music professionally, and he decided to move to London in order to follow that goal.

There, he fell in with a crowd of local university students. He was introduced to Scott MacDonald, who had moved to London from Glasgow, in part, to pursue the same dream as Ceylan. The two quickly felt a creative affinity, and over time, they formed a math-rock outfit that gave them their first true experiences playing around the London DIY circuit.

That band later would frequently support vocalist Will Rowland’s dream-pop group, and the pair of bands found modest success within their respective niches. But when the Pandemic shut down all live performances, Ceylan’s isolation spawned a fresh idea. He had grown, at least partially, tired of the constrictions the math-rock genre had placed upon him and the sounds he was able to achieve within that domain. He downloaded Ableton to his computer, and he began scrawling out expansive electronic instrumentals in an effort to peer into that void.

“During the pandemic, I got into producing and Ableton. And after the pandemic, I just had [a ton] of demos basically on my hard drive, sitting. And one day I just asked Will, because I was really a fan of Will's voice and just the way he sings and his songwriting. So I asked him if he wanted to lay down some vocals on these electronic tracks And that's how it started.”

While Ceylan’s demos began merely as an experiment, Rowland’s vocals granted them a fuller life— simultaneously haunting in their extremity and soothing in their swelling soundscapes. The two then enlisted MacDonald as their drummer, and Ebbb found its initial form.

Over the first couple years of the project, the band focused merely on etching out singular tracks, each of which was a fresh expression and exploration of their initial vision. “Himmel” and “Swarm” put the group’s range on full display, with “Himmel” representing their dreamier brand of sonic distention and “Swarm” representing some of their more trance-inducing, rhythmic atmospheres. “Manners” and “Eyes” then began a chain of experimentations that culminated in “Book That You Like”, which in addition to being the band’s biggest song to date, also displayed a unique blend of the poppier elements in Rowland's songwriting and the atmospheric approach they had taken since the outset of the project.

When they began work on their debut album, however, the group knew they needed to approach each track as a blank canvas. They had no obligation to what they had accomplished beforehand, and they vowed to throw off any constrictions that may have been left, even subconsciously, from their old ways of making music. They had struck a new balance, and they intended to follow it to its logical endpoints.

“Each song was almost like a whole new session basically, where it's like ‘Okay here's another puzzle to make all these different elements work together,’” said Ceylan, “The process was very much we started, we had a clear vision, and then in the middle it [became]hard to keep track of every moving bit. Literally every minute of the album is different, but then when it was all done, we all sat there and listened to it all the way through with dim lights… We felt like we cracked the narrative and the arc of the album.”

From the first swelling chords of “Come Alive” to the trance-inducing intricacies of tracks like “Remedy” and “Moving On” Shallow Hits is a colossal work, spanning the depths and the potentialities of the fleeting sound that Ceylan first attempted to hold captive.

For Rowland, though, Shallow Hits is simply the first step in the experimentations the band wants to undertake. That “blank canvas” ethos that defined the first record is, in fact, a sort of motto for the project as a whole. Ebbb is truly not interested, yet, in narrowing itself into a niche— the possibilities for their current sonic balance are too vast and too intriguing.

“I think it's a continuous process of discovery whenever we're writing stuff, and as Lev said maybe that's always going to be the case. We’re always just kind of searching for a particular mood. I feel like the nature of the identity of the band is that it's so kind of multifaceted and varied,” said Rowland, “I think we just want to keep exploring different sonic terrain.”

Yet those explorations, as they’re expressed on Shallow Hits, are not simply a stepping stone on Ebbb’s inevitable path. Across the project’s 11 tracks, the entire band feels as though they’ve accomplished something monumental— they’ve brought their vision, first formed in isolation, to a collective manifestation of everything unique about their sound.

“I think as the releases have gone on, I think they sound better to us. And the album has a lot of stuff in it that we're really huge fans of,” said MacDonald, “There's a few tracks in there that, I would probably speak for all of us, are the best work we've done.”