Sound and taste: Lobe Studio and Bar Gobo team up to offer a sensory date night
Package includes an experience with the East Van studio’s 4DSOUND technology and anything off the natural-wine bar’s menu
Strathcona’s Lobe Studios is North America’s first dedicated spatial sound studio to use 4DSOUND technology.
HERE’S A DATE-NIGHT option that you won’t find anywhere else in North America: an immersive visit to Lobe Studio followed by wine and snacks at the intimate Bar Gobo.
Lobe is the first dedicated spatial sound studio on the continent to use 4DSOUND technology. With speakers across the ceiling and under the floor, as well as the use multi-channel “vibrotransducers”, sound flows all around, under, and above you, for a full-on visceral listening experience.
Vancouver-based music artists Kate De Lorme and Edo Van Breemen founded Lobe and its parent company, Inscapes Spatial Sound. De Lorme, who has a BFA with a major in theatre design and production from UBC, has worked extensively in live performance with a focus on contemporary dance. Integrating sound landscapes, sound healing, and guided meditation in her work, she was artist in residence at the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest in 2018.
Van Breemen, formerly of the band Brasstronaut and former acting director of Unfamiliar Records, is a composer and immersive-sound producer with a background in classical piano, live performance, and film scoring. (He’s one half of the Transatlantic Film Orchestra with Johannes Winkler.). He focuses on designing and composing acoustic experiences to augment cognitive behavioural and somatic therapy modalities.
At the core of Inscapes’ mandate is the enhancement of mental health. Funded by Amplify BC's Music Company Development, Lobe launched right before the pandemic hit. (It also offers private sessions, artists’ rentals, and access to marginalized communities.)
Bar Gobo specializes in natural wine.
Bar Gobo is the newest venture from Andrea Carlson, chef-owner of Burdock & Co. and Harvest Community Foods. (Gobo means “burdock” in Japanese.) The casual space specializes in natural wines. (The term broadly describes those that are generally made with hand-picked grapes from sustainable, organic, biodynamic vineyards grown by small-scale, independent producers; that are fermented with no added yeast or additives; and that have only small amounts of sulfites or none at all.) Among the B.C. wineries currently featured are Synchromesh, Averill Creek, Bella, and Lightning Rock; there are carefully selected bottles from Italy, Germany, Austria, Portugal, and beyond.
Carlson, an acclaimed chef who has been ahead of the curve in terms of sourcing local, using wild ingredients, and devising creative cooking techniques, has designed a small menu of sophisticated bar bites plus a few larger plates. Think Sunseeker Oysters with fermented carrot hot sauce, albacore tuna tartare accompanied by preserved bergamot citrus, tofu custard, and chicory Caesar with pickled coronation grapes and garlic crumb. Dinner for the table is another option. (Snacks start at $9; dinner for the table is $45 per person.)
Vancouver-based music artists Kate De Lorme and Edo Van Breemen are the founders of Lobe Studio. Photo by Asterios Moutsokapas
Here’s how the Lobe x Bar Gobo date-night package ($210) works. You start at Lobe (713 East Hastings Street), taking in one of three private 90-minute Spatial Sound experiences. Then you use your $10 Uber voucher to take you to Bar Gobo (237 Union Street), where you have a $60 voucher to spend as you please.
The three options at Lobe are Sta/g-mos, a guided meditation and immersive sound healing journey through the whole body by De Lorme; Sounds for a Room, by Sean Evans, a transportive musical experience with organic and synthesized sounds; and van Breemen’s Deep Channel, a “liminal program consisting of shifting patterns of recurring tones, pitch intervals, and sound design” in which sub frequencies are pulsed through the floor transducers to give participants a combined visceral (haptic) and acoustic listening experience. Deep Channel is described as being a “powerful tool for achieving deeper states of mind and body awareness through deep listening”.
For more information, visit Lobe Studio or Bar Gobo.
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