Interview: Rex Broome and Christina Bulbenko of The Armoires

Rex Broome and Christina Bulbenko are the founders of the fast-growing Big Stir Records and rock band The Armoires. They are releasing their fourth album on the 11th of October, the appropriately titled Octoberland. The music is fabulous and I love the art nouveau meets psychedelia meets anime look of the album cover. It’s an album with a theme of mythology and mixing the old and new, something refreshing to hear in music, as much as I love classic rock, when I listen to new music I want to hear something unique and fresh, not a carbon copy of the past. Rex and Christina take pride in their fresh approach to music: a fusion of influences throughout time with some quirk, because who wants to be ordinary or normal?

A highlight of the album is the charity single “Snake Island Thirteen” which talks about Ukrainian mythology. Christina is of Ukrainian descent and is very proud of her heritage and it’s always cool to see people mixing their culture with rock and roll. You can stream it here:

We’re very lucky to have Rex and Christina here with us on The Diversity of Classic Rock to talk about their journey as musicians, record label owners, and creatives.

Angie: How did The Armoires get started?

Christina: Well, [it’s an] interesting story. We worked at a music school together, and we started going to karaoke, to practice singing, to blow off steam after work, yeah, on Monday nights, and realised that we harmonised pretty well together. And at that very place, there was somebody that was putting together a tribute band for the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and was looking for people to join. So we ended up learning all the songs.

Rex: Yeah he kind of just needed people to fill out his band. It was material that we liked a lot. It was like, oh, okay, I can be the guitarist in this. I was kind of moving out of the band I was in,

Christina: And I learned how to play the bass.

Rex: And Christina learned how to play the bass, because he needed a female bassist to embody Tina Weymouth.

Christina: And I had the blonde hair at the time.

Rex: So we worked on that for a while and then we were just discovering how our voices work together. It kept not coalescing. Long story short, the project that kind of put us together didn’t happen. We ended up working on our own original material and and that very quickly became the focus that was 10 years ago, four albums ago. And, yeah, here we are.

Angie: So what brought you to Los Angeles?

Rex: We came to Los Angeles separately in the late 80s, early 90s, we didn’t know each other until about 10 or 12 years ago, I came from West Virginia for school, and Christina came from Detroit.

Christina: I was in Kansas City doing theatre and commercial work, and I ended up coming out here. There were lots of friends that I had that were already living here, and my friend whose house I was subletting in Kansas City, had already moved out here, and so I ended up here.

Rex: And it’s been a long time. We’ve both been here for a long time. And, you know, had families here. And, yeah, this is just, we’re not natives, but, like, compared to most people in Los Angeles, we are, you know, very few people here who are from here, and we’ve been here for longer than, like a lot of the people that we know.

Angie: How much have things changed?

Rex: That’s an interesting question. How much has it changed? It’s more expensive, of course.

Christina: Well, I live in the suburbs now, in Burbank. I did live in Hollywood for 14 years. So that’s very different. It’s a very different world. Just going over the hill from the Valley into the city is…

Rex: Yeah, from region to region it’s always been different. My thoughts on this actually dive way too much into US politics. But like, for most of the time I’ve lived out here, I’ve lived in this neighbourhood called called Highland Park, which is moderately gentrifying at this point, but it’s, you know, a fundamentally Latino neighbourhood. And then, you know, it really bothers me when certain political figures are trying to demonise immigrants and they’re saying, ‘Oh, it’s all going to hell’, and stuff like, it’s the same as when I was here before, it’s just, you just go out on the street. People are hanging out. It’s pretty chill. So there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance in our politics. And I’m kind of a ground zero for it, in my opinion.

Christina: However, my Harris-Walz sign is still on the lawn so that’s good news!

Rex: It is California.

Angie: How did Big Stir Records get started?

Christina: That was what as The Armoires? We got frustrated with doing shows where you were given a half hour set, and there was a you know, metal band before you and a rap band after you…

Rex: And payola! And pay to play.

Christina: We got tired of it.

Rex: Los Angeles has a legendarily difficult, oversaturated live scene. And for decades now it’s been, you know, mostly pay to play the big venues are, you know, just, sort of make you pre sell tickets and stuff like that. And so it’s a place where a lot of people, you know, maybe more than anywhere else, do play live. But it’s also incredibly difficult. So, yeah.

Christina: So we started a live series with like minded musicians, like minded bands, and we called it Big Stir Live Concert Series and you’d see four or five bands.

Rex: And first local bands, and then it started to pick up, you know, as we met people, you know, connected with people online, there would start to be bands from all over the US, bands from the UK.

Christina: We became a tour stop too. So that grew until the pandemic hit. But during that time, one of the bands that played with us, Plasticsoul, decided they were going to put out their album that they had finished on Big Stir Records. And we’re like, well, there is no Big Stir Records. He says, ‘Well, there is now!’

Rex: I mean, the thought was that a community was forming around this live series here and in the UK, and we’d take that community to the the label level and help co-promote each other, and have the shows, promote the records and things like that. Yeah, Steven from Plasticsoul’s point was we already have the brand, you know, we already have the name. It’s already Big Stir that people come to every month, you know, here. And there was a UK version of it too. It’s called Big Stir Britannia. We had Big Stir Britannia and Big Stir Burbank, you know, for a while there. And the thought was let’s take this community thing and make it into a label. And so we did.

Christina: And that was BSR, 0001.

Rex: The catalogue number for the first record, yeah. At the outset of the pandemic, when live went away, we did a little bit of soul searching to figure out, you know, what our focus was going to be. The label already existed, and we thought we were in a position to do more for artists that were kind of at at loose ends during that time.

Christina: And also got distribution in 2021.

Rex: And it just expanded. Everything we have to do just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and by the time people were starting to play live again, we were completely committed and booked doing label stuff so that’s kind of where we are today.

Angie: Would you say that most of the music released by your label is more power pop or a variety of things?

Christina: It’s French, it’s guitar pop, college 80s, college rock.

Rex: It is definitely always expanding in genres, and I think we are as artists. We’re interested in songwriting a lot, but kind of songwriting in a band and in pop context. I think there are other labels and other artists that sort of, really, have the actual traditional power pop as their focus. We tend to want to have things that kind of start with that blueprint and push it in new directions.

Christina: A friend of ours, Robbie Rist put it very succinctly. I think it’s music that scratches the itch. It’s not really power pop, but it scratches the edge.

Rex: Like it’s hook-oriented, but the subject matter, I mean, we tend to really gravitate towards artists that sort of push the subject matter out a little bit more. They get a little bit more sophisticated in the songwriting. And then, you know, we’ll find that bands from kind of adjacent genres like post-punk and the indie folk and that sort of thing. So I think it’s got to be at this point, if you look at the overall scale of it, it’s, you know, indie pop or indie rock, and it’s not, you know, that’s very undescriptive, but we always wanted to be a label that had kind of our own sound, like a Creation, or a 4AD, or an SST, or something like that where, you know, not every band is the same genre, but you can see why they’re with that label. And occasionally, people do mention us in the same breaths as some of those. So that always feels really, really good.

Angie: How would you describe your music to a new listener?

Rex: I think that, you know, it’s going to be pursuits. It’s going to be perceived as to somewhat of a degree chamber pop, because we have strings, we have a full time violist. I think we’re probably the only band outside the Velvet Underground that has a full time violist for most of our career. And once again, we kind of consider ourselves to be indie pop in the in the sense of a band like The New Pornographers, and we draw from a pretty broad swath of history. So there will be people that hear us as a very 60s oriented band, something along the lines of Jefferson Airplane, Byrds, type of thing. There’ll be people that hear 80s college rock, because there’s definitely a whole lot of, you know, the REM and The Church and that whole Athens scene and any of the Manchester bands. Post-punk is a big is a big part of the stew as well.

Christina: You know what I forgot to mention? Our little slogan ‘pop outside the box’ is how we describe our label.

Rex: So I think we get anyone that’s kind of like, dialled into, sort of expansive. New Pornographers are always a huge touchstone for us. I mean, that’s a band that I think really reflects the kind of things we do. But one of the interesting things about The Armoires is as this band that has co-front singers, that we do harmony almost all the way through and it’s a male-female back and forth, is that’s a sort of format that isn’t tied to an era or a genre. There are just bands like that that crop up in pretty much every era, you know. And that would be, you know, everything from Jefferson Airplane and kind of folk revival bands and things like that, to Fleetwood Mac to X, kind of putting it into a punk context, we already said New Pornographers. Even like someone like the B-52s fits the model.

Christina: We like quirk.

Rex: So yeah, we’re almost part of a heritage that sort of threads its way through other eras and we like to put that chemistry front and centre and even kind of make it some of the subject matter in the songs sometimes.

Angie: What was it like writing and recording Octoberland?

Christina: It was a joy. We wrote the songs all in one block of time, which was about a month and a half.

Rex: This was a real joy. This is our fourth record, and I think this is the first time when we weren’t writing new things, and also including other songs that might have been written for or that have been developed when we were playing them live, or written for other other contexts and things like that.

Christina: And we wanted initially to to record a full band album all at once in the studio, but we weren’t able to do that. So this was a different kind of thing. This was a very collaborative thing between the two of us, and then involved collaboration from the bands, the band members writing and arranging their own parts too.

Rex: There was a very collective feel to it, which started with the two of us, and yet, for the first time, we had a clean slate, and the two of us sat down and started writing the songs together, and it was this really wonderful thing when it kind of took on a life of its own.

Christina: Each song informed the next, and the next, and the next.

Rex: As we worked on it, and kind of put it back and forth, we were like, ‘Oh, these, these certain images are coming up again.’ Does that belong in this one too? It would be like, both thematic things.

Christina: Myths and omens. And they became motifs and tropes.

Rex: We started feeling like it all had a singular purpose. We wanted to tap into this sort of underlying storytelling, folkloric, and mythological tradition that kind of goes all the way up to today, because we felt like it was important for that to be a common ground for people in communicating, which seems extremely difficult and fraught these days. And so we kind of picked our images, that we’re going to call back to those sort of things. And yeah, like Christina said, you know, as we worked on one song, we’re sort of like, this is similar to what we’re saying in another song, what if we use some of the same language in this one? And it sort of really took on a life of its own. It became pretty instinctive pretty quickly.

Christina: And Michael Simmons from sparkle*jets u.k. actually sat down and listened to the demos with us and decided to take the project on to produce, which is another wonderful aspect of how the album came together.

Rex: It’s very communal and very collaborative, but it also was a pretty tight-knit group on this one, like we’ve had a lot of guests for different reasons. On previous albums, we were either tapping into our friends on kind of the International indie pop scene, and then sometimes we just had lineups that were in flux. So we did that before this time, it was definitely the five members, which is the two of us, Christina’s daughter, Larysa on the viola, John Borack on drums and Clifford Ulrich on bass. John’s been with us for five years, Cliff’s been with us since almost the beginning.

Christina: Miranda recorded the base for the demo for Snake Island 13, his child.

Rex: And Michael Simmons, as the producer, was extremely involved in this too. So it was essentially the band and Michael Simmons and then a lot of other people contributed to the visual side of it too, which was a lot of fun. My other child, Ridley, she’s 21 now, she did all the design work, all that sort of Art Nouveau influenced things that have been part of the album.

Christina: Speaking of design work, are you wearing paisley?

Angie: Yes!

Rex: Thank you!

Christina: Did you do that specifically for us?

Angie: I have a lot of paisley shirts, I’m an avid vintage clothing collector.

Christina: We’re known as The Paisley Twins around here.

Rex: We used to have the same hair too. We used to be both platinum blonde with the glasses and the paisley. But for this album…

Christina: The album’s palette is teal and copper. So he’s teal and I’m copper.

Angie: What mythology inspired the album?

Rex: Well, I think we wanted to look at it as a bit of a continuum. There’s a song called “Snake Island 13” on there, which is about the Ukrainian conflict.

Christina: We dove into the history of the island and discovered that there was a lot of mythology surrounding the history.

Rex: This is the location where the famous “Go Fuck Yourself” Russian warship incident occurred.

Christina: [There were] thirteen soldiers were confronted by the two Russian warships.

Rex: And they had no hope. And Christina, her heritage is Ukrainian. So it’s been something that we’ve been really dialled into.

Christina: Explosions were heard and we assumed they had been killed at the time that we were writing this. It was a very traumatic story. And then when we looked up Snake Island 13, they’re fine, by the way, they made it out.

Rex: I think we wanted to, we were compelled to do a song about the conflict, but we wanted to be something other than just a sort of a really boilerplate protest song. We thought it deserved more than that. And as we read about this story about the soldiers, and we read about the location, we found that there was this mythological underpinning about the location itself. It’s supposedly where Achilles is buried and his ghost sort of haunts the shores.

Christina: And birds that wet the towers with their wings wash the towers.

Rex: We felt like the story of these soldiers became this meme that became well known and crossed over the modern online circulation of memes, and we suddenly kind of felt like, and we’re talking about mythology, which was an oral tradition. Much like a lot of the religious texts, these were oral stories that were collected, lore.

We did a similar sort of dive into storytelling and narrative tropes on the song “Ridley And Me After the Apocalypse”. That’s a lot of discussion there, which comes out of the kind of conversations that my daughter and I have about how once you get into an adventure story, there are certain things that are going to happen. There’s a lot of things that happen there where we’ll talk about like, you know, as we live, and, you know, an actual apocalypse, if we were doing a narrative version of this, like an animated series or a movie, or something, this would be the part where we get the crew together, this would be the part where we acquire our animal companions, where we move into the village and have to help them learn to defend themselves against the the local raiders and things like that. And we kind of just play with those things too. I mean, there are a lot of folkloric references that are sort of, you know, witchy. We refer to a lot of omens. We refer to the Shakespearean, well I guess that’s Julius Caesar, the lion in the streets. That’s an omen. We talk a lot about ravens and crows as symbols of death. We tap into this thing with the Ouroboros, yeah, the snake that swallows its own tail. And we kind of take that on as a symbol of self involvement, people not being able to think outside, not being open to new ideas. You know, that snake is just kind of consuming itself. And we’re always sort of advocating be open to some other ideas. And a lot of what draws us together are these storytelling traditions.

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A post shared by The Armoires (@the_armoires)

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A post shared by The Armoires (@the_armoires)

Christina: (Shows the album artwork) I’m gonna show off here. This one’s signed, but you can see Ridley, his daughter. Rex has the teal hair, and I have the copper, that’s Larysa in the middle, John the drummer next to her, and then Cliff on the end. And then this was done as the single cover for “Music & Animals”.

Angie: I love the cats!

Rex: Cats are wonderful, and the cats are part of the fabric of it too. I mean the song “Music & Animals” and several other songs refer to Corbett’s cats and reptiles. This is, yeah, the crow, Phoenix. We felt that although we’re not doing a folk record per se, or retro record, in any way that thematically… Yeah, it was a delight working on the visuals to this too. And we have to say our producer, Michael Simmons was a big part of it as well. We wanted the look for this that was sort of ambiguously antique, not like we’re actually doing a period piece we’re doing, you know, turn of the previous century music with those kinds of instruments.

Christina: Like an anime feel to it.

Angie: Oh, nice. I just got back from Japan!

Rex: Oh wonderful. I think our feel is we were looking at this Art Nouveau meets anime kind of thing because we’ve got one foot in some pretty ancient places, and then some kind of modern aesthetics too. We think it’s fun because we are clearly not young people, per se, but we have so much back and forth. It’s a multi generational band, obviously, with Christina’s daughter, and we did a lot of the collaboration with my daughter, and on the visuals and a lot of these conversations kind of cross over between, mostly, you know, Gen X and Zoomer concerns and a lot of the language we use is not, you know, of our generation. Some of it’s quite antique, and some of it is more zoomer-y, I mean. And we like that sort of timeless feel.

Christina: Like one foot in the past and a foot in the future.

Rex: And down somewhere in the middle, probably.

Angie: Like, when I looked at the visuals, it reminded me a bit of Alphonse Mucha and then a bit of Aubrey Beardsley as well in there. Who were inspirations?

Rex: [Mucha] was a very big one. In fact, the cover is a specific riff on a cognac girl, this little cognac biscuit thing. It hangs on the and we, we started with that. One of the funny things about it is we have that print hanging at my house, and it’s a little bit discoloured. If you look up that that print, it’s a lot more earth tone-y, but ours has this sort of teal and copper cast to it. So we absolutely used that. We had the logo design, you know, that went very much in that realm too. But yeah, and we thought like, you know, it also kind of works as a without having to do anything 60s and psychedelic, you know, there’s an element of that to our sound too, but that was an influence on so many of those, you know, psychedelic concert posters too.

Angie: Oh yeah like Klaus Voormann and [Victor] Moscoso, a bunch of other ones. And I can’t remember the names, but yeah.

Rex: Anything that was playing at the Fillmore, you know. Those are iconic too. So we sort of felt like this was, again, touching on, and it’s got that sort of anime cast to it too. So it was, you know, crossing a bunch of eras without it being like an obnoxious mash up kind of thing, it was fun. And if you look at the videos that we’ve done and are working on for the singles that have come out already, you’ll see that we’ve collaborated with a lot of people, and they all kind of picked up on and augmented and added to this sort of particular timeless vibe that we were creating. And we’re really proud of that. There’s been all these talented people, but it’s all very cogent. I I just wrote a piece for a magazine about the art design and stuff like that. So my head is really in this place, about it.

Christina: It’s gonna be in Outsideleft. They’re doing, is it a whole week on us?

Rex: They’re doing a week’s worth of pieces on us.

Christina: And they wanted some lifestyle things. So I’ve got to write how to dress like an Armoire piece today.

Rex: And I did the art of it, and of course there’s a review and an interview.

Angie: What inspires your style?

Christina: We just talked about this yesterday. At first we weren’t sure. We started with some retro vintage-y…

Rex: Yeah, it’s hard to remember because we’ve been in this realm for so long now, you know, and happy to be so with little tweaks here and there. There was a time when we had to decide.

Christina: So we started going to thrift stores, and we had a really good score one day.

Rex: Which I’m wearing actually, right?

Christina: You’re wearing yours.

Rex: This was the first of the many specifically paisley shirts that I started picking up.

Christina: We decided that it was going to be pretty easy to do that, is to just find paisley and sort of match styles and tones and things like that, just so that we could have an identity. And Rex started wearing glasses. I’ve always worn glasses because he couldn’t read.

Rex: Because I stopped being able to see.

Christina: (laughs) So then that became a thing and my hair started going white so I was getting blonde highlights and lowlights just to make that transition a little easier. And then we did that for Rex and so we had the blonde, the glasses, and the paisley and we became the Paisley Twins. And it’s pretty much still like that today, except for the looking like the album thing.

Rex: I think we just always wanna, without it being a superficial thing or without it being a gimmick, is do a little bit of a show of commitment to what we do, that we’re not just showing up on stage in t-shirts.

Christina: John, our drummer’s into paisley too and he’s got a Converse collection and he’s got paisley Chucks that he wears too.

Rex: It helps to have an identity. I think that everything we’ve ever done has meant to be unique.

Christina: There was a time where we all had the same jackets.

Rex: We did all have the same, you can find press photos of us, we had paisley laminated jackets. I think we always wanted there to be sort of a visual identification that indicates that we’re thoughtful about every aspect of what we do.

Angie: Is that advice you’d give to a musician, to stand out and be yourself?

Rex: I mean, we don’t like to direct anyone, but we do notice the presentation of this album, a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about has come from us observing what works and doesn’t work for other artists out there. And I think it’s kind of, a little bit miraculous that what actually seems to work is usually more artistic than hype. There’s so much music coming at you that hype is alienating, to be real. It doesn’t really get people excited, but something that’s already intriguing, unique, and quirky and you feel like I’d like to see more of that and if you start following along with it you’ll see that you’re not getting spammed with the same material over and over again, but it all feels like part of one thing. I think in some sense, quirk and identity are all that a modern indie musician has going for them. Because anyone can make a great version of a certain type of song, it’s very very easy. And it makes sense, you start looking back at the artists that have great legacies that their music is still listened to and they’re still followed and stuff like that. Very few of them are just like absolutely technically brilliant at what they do, they just are inventive and have something unique about them that draws you back to them over and over again. They’re not like easily..

Christina: Pegged?

Rex: It’s not even so much that, they’re not interchangeable. It’s not interchangeable pop music, it’s not like you can switch out Bowie or Prince or Bob Dylan. There’s something really really distinctive about all of them. The Lou Reeds and the John Cales.

Christina: I want to show this off! You know why? Because look, you’re now teal hair and I’m now this hair and it’s the same sort of pattern.

Rex: A little bit of history here.

Christina: These [photos] are around ten years old.

Angie: Wow!

Rex: They’re older than that because they were used when we got them.

Christina: That’s true. It must be. And then so this was funny, so we found gold lamé paisley jackets that we all wore for a video and this paisley vest. We all had white shirts underneath.

Rex: That was actually almost sort of a dropped period because that was when we were about to do our next tour stuff, when the pandemic happened instead. We were really going to, I think we did it for two shows, but we were going to have those matching jackets on tour. We ended up doing an album during the pandemic which was called Incognito and it was…

Christina: Singles by fake bands.

Rex: The label had a singles series going. We were introducing a lot of different bands and we just kind of started playing around with our own identity and putting out these singles by bands that didn’t exist, but it was actually us. There were seven months in a row where there was a new band with a double sided single. Ultimately we had sort of unmasked, that would be the incognito aspect of it. Those were all us and here is the album and that was a bit of playing around with our own identity and kind of really zero in on what we really wanted to do and that’s how we landed at the place where we had a really good concept of what this band is, what it does, what its strengths are, and how to use them and started writing Octoberland.

Angie: It seems like you have a lot of concepts and everything is done intentionally and cohesively. What are your proudest accomplishments as musicians?

Christina: I think this album is it for me.

Rex: Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, to kind of create a singular work and something that we were pretty sure was going to be received rather well, but it’s definitely kind of wouldn’t matter. We think that we created something that’s really quintessential to us, nobody else could have done it.

Christina: Plus there’s chanting and counting and there’s childlike silliness to it with a message.

Rex: Yeah, it’s sort of got this really, almost juvenile top layer to it like we like to think that if you listen to it through for the first time it almost plays like a party album, like a sort of B-52’s type of thing, but there’s this undercurrent of something that could have been Lou Reed or Leonard Cohen, this very sort of literary thing that creeps up on you. But we never got sick of it, we always felt like, and it didn’t change, from very early on it had…

Christina: It all stayed the same from the very beginning. And “Music & Animals” was the last song written and it was just sort of popped in there.

Rex: So I think I would say we’re very proud of all the work we’ve done to get to the point where people are going to actually hear this one and we’ve come through with something that we’re really proud of. Getting to this point and being able to do on our fourth album what we’re put on earth to do, I think that makes us feel better than anything else.

Angie: What’s next for the band?

Christina: We would like to rehearse. We haven’t gotten a chance to rehearse and sort of plan a tour. We keep getting asked by people all over in England to come over and…

Rex: We haven’t been there since the very first time that the label started.

Christina: And we’d like to be able to play some songs from this album. I’ve been running the label and my daughter’s been on a project, she’s an environmental scientist and she’s been on site a lot of the time for the last year and our drummer is very busy with his own gigs. He does a lot of Beatles tribute gigs and DJ gigs. He’s got a work schedule that’s long. So it’s nearly impossible to get all of us together at the same time.

Rex: It would have been impossible during this record because we’ve focused so much on when we can get the band together, it’s going to need to be a video shoot or a photoshoot.

You can follow The Armoires on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Octoberland comes out on 11 October.

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