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Copy / Mobius Beard
If Marius Libman is concerned with being pegged as another Eighties' revivalist, he's not showing it. Sure, it'd be easy to discredit his debut album as the definition of his production monicer - a Copy.Yet there's more to Mobius Beard than meets the precursory preview. Occupying a strange space between Ghostly glitch and saccharin-sweet electro-pop, there's a suprising unpredicability within each track. On "Plagiarhythm", warm phonograph pops and a seemingly tepid hip hop beat play sleight-of-hand on the ears, suddenly engaging as swirling cyclic melodies skate figure-eights around organ-drum rhythms just this side of Ratatat. "It's A Little Too Late" combines the gleeful spirit of Yaz filtered through an NES emulator. Throughout the rest of the album, Copy continues eschewing the boring winks and prerequisite electro-set posturing for sincerity, and Mobius Beard reflects the sound of an artist who removed the tongue from his cheek before licking the 9-volt of Dre, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Isolee. Zap!

XLR8R
Copy / Mobius Beard
Mobius Beard, the debut record from Portland's Copy (a.k.a. Marius Libman), is an 8-bit masterpeice of fuzzy synth harmonies and innovative beats. Bustling with jovial melody and human frailty, it fits in well on E*Rock's Audio Dregs label [and] begs repeated listening.

FADER
DJ Copy / Diva Mixtape Vol. 1
If you dug the bleep-n-bloop of folks like Ratatat and the Blow, the DJ Copy's The Diva EP is your bonus beat of the year - six homebaked remixes where jankey keyboard lines and Mariah Carey give each other hugs. Mimi's "Emotions" gets a synthpop workout, "No Scrubs" is reimagined as a recital for electric bass and Sega Master System, and Janet ditches Jermaine Dupri for Johnny 5 on an ultrahot version of "Someone To Call My Lover". Some of the accapellas now jag where they actually should diva out, but the bangers bang - and the whole time you wonder why this concept is relegated to a vaguely artsy homemade CD-R instead of an actual album. The Postal Service sold half a mil doing this kinda shit with Death Cab schlubbing on the mic.

Copy This, Sucka
Copy Returns Old School IDM Beats to PDX
BY CHAS BOWIE of Portland Mercury

ONE OF THE REASONS I gravitated towards electronic music in the '90s was that it introduced me to crazy sounds I'd never heard before. From Mr. Oizo's stretchy balloon-fart sonic waves to sinister voice modulations and deconstructive anti-rhythms, IDM completely expanded the range of noises emanating from my speakers. Over the past several years, electronic composers have taken to more organic approaches of layering live instruments and samples over beats. While I have zero beef with this approach, it was wildly refreshing to get my hands on Mobius Beard, the forthcoming CD by Copy, a young Portland laptop wizard.

Mobius Beard's beats and rhythms are tight, like pre-Richard D. James Aphex Twin, which give the tracks a structured urgency. "Backward" works like a spine-popping "Axel F. Theme" with squeaky pitch shifts, layered handclaps, and a Kraftwerk-inspired bassline, while "Afro Oven" reminds me of a Miami Sound Machine song remixed by UNKLE.

Marius Libman, who records and performs as Copy, came to his current sound through a wide variety of influences. After spending most of his youth in front of a Nintendo, listening to these "crazy, squelchy analog synthesizer sounds," he played bass in various punk bands. His attentions turned to fusion jazz, but when Aphex Twin's Richard D. James CD dropped, he realized how badass electronica could be. His brother helped him get started making beats on his mom's PC, and Marius was hooked. A few years after it was released, he discovered Dr. Dre's The Chronic 2001. "That CD pushed me into more of a pop sensibility. Before that, I was in this Squarepusher mindset of showing off how crazy and complex you could get on the computer, but after listening to The Chronic, I became more interested in making good songs first, and showing off my skills second."
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Select, Cut...
A regular Joe by day, Marius Libman will make you work by night.
BY MARK BAUMGARTEN of the Willamette Week

Marius Libman, like 99.9 percent of the world, is a worker bee. And, like many Portland worker bees, Libman serves a handful of masters: The bearded 25-year-old works as a barista at downtown's Coffee Plant, books and bartends at fashionable Northeast hipster club Dunes, washes dishes at fashionable Southeast hipster club Holocene, and manages to find time to keep the eastside Ozone 3 record stock in order. (To read about another Ozone employee, see page 33.)

But after Libman gets home to his Southeast apartment, sheds the shirt soaked with the smell of your cigs-beans-beer-bullshit, and sits down at his PC, he is a worker bee no longer. Here, as Portland's electro artist Copy, Libman commands a library of sound to create complex compositions that allow him to lord over another space, the one between the stage edge and the back wall. There, his dense and melodic electro beat-frenzies have been ordering Portlanders to dance, much to Libman's surprise.

"People will come up to me and say, 'I can't believe you got everyone dancing," says Libman. "And I'll say, 'Neither can I.'"

Libman, who moved to Portland from Kirkland, Wash., five years ago, claims to have no idea how he's doing it, but he is, boasting a debut LP, Mobius Beard, that can be played from front to back without a single miss rearing its head.

I asked the beatsmith to run me through his creative process.

To many, the process Libman has honed since moving to Portland is no big deal. Audio-editing software, like the somewhat outdated Acid program Libman uses, is ubiquitous, and the setup is relatively simple. The overhead for creating digital compositions—which requires a computer, turntable and records—is a hell of a lot more manageable than being in a band, which requires instruments, a practice space, a van, and an ability to deal with other musicians' ideas and unsavory habits. On the other hand, attending a band practice is a hell of a lot more exciting than watching Libman at work in his home/studio.

Sitting at his computer, Libman pulls up the file for a song called "See You Around Maybe" and walks me through the song's 16 tracks. Three are break beats from live drum-kit sounds—"two from late-'70s disco tracks, and I nabbed a kick-drum sound from an early-'80s synth-pop song"—while another five are rhythm tracks pulled from digital recording of garage sounds, which are basically random clacks, scrapes and clicks. On top of that, Libman has written eight separate melodic tracks on his MIDI keyboard, which emits a squelch that gives the song a texture of an 8-bit video-game soundtrack. It is all painstaking and, to me, boring work, but when Libman loops his tracks, lines them up and then pushes the beats-per-minute into the red, he can coerce a crowd to dance as though their vibrating bodies were serving some necessary utilitarian purpose. Making honey, perhaps.