thereminOG 2002

If eZabel had a resident musicologist, cultural anthropologist, and aspiring expatriate all rolled into one earnest, slightly verbose package, it was Robbie Kilpatrick. Arriving in early 2002 under the short-lived handle clapthematter -- a name borrowed from a song on the Batman & Robin soundtrack that unfortunately invited the wrong kind of interpretation -- he quickly rebranded as theremin, after the only musical instrument in the world you play without touching. It was a perfect alias for someone who seemed to exist slightly adjacent to the mainstream in every possible way. Where most people on eZabel debated the merits of mainstream rock, Robbie was deep into Badly Drawn Boy, Sigur Ros, Super Furry Animals, Tortoise, and Soul Coughing, constructing painstakingly detailed concert calendars that read like alternative culture dispatches from the front lines of the New York and Philadelphia live music scenes. He named his instruments after celebrity crushes -- Mila the theremin, Jewel the acoustic guitar, Charlize the drum set -- and could deliver a five-paragraph history of the tannerin versus the ondes martenot versus the actual theremin with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely believed you needed to know this.

What set Robbie apart was the sheer breadth of his curiosity. He could pivot from explaining SQL JOIN statements and Java class constructors in the Programming forum (where iwz patiently debugged his code) to posting the entire end credits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Movies and Television, to offering travel advice about narrowboat rides through Little Venice in London and walking tours of Conwy Castle in Wales. He was a real estate agent who could quote absorption rates and mortgage calculations, a DJ with myriad twelve-inch records, a would-be screenwriter who tore up his synopsis in frustration, a Norwegian language student whose ultimate life plan involved working his way from London to Norway via international work permits. He actually pulled off the London chapter -- moving abroad in 2004, surviving two months of pounding the pavement before landing work, and documenting the whole experience with the kind of vulnerable honesty that made you root for him. When he returned to the States and eventually landed in a studio apartment on Staten Island, he was still chasing the next horizon, eyeing Philadelphia, then Australia before he turned thirty.

His closest interactions were with fivezero, socalgal, iwz, and brotherman -- though with brotherman, the dynamic was more sparring partner than kindred spirit. Their legendary Music Talk thread battles over indie versus mainstream music produced some of eZabel's most spirited exchanges, with Robbie passionately defending bands like Boredoms and Super Furry Animals while brotherman declared he would rather listen to his kids scream than endure punk rock. Robbie took these things personally -- he admitted as much -- and there were moments where he wore his heart a little too openly, pleading for a handshake and quoting scriptures about brotherly love when the ribbing cut too deep. fivezero called him out for the British slang he adopted even before moving to England, and Robbie bristled, but fivezero was not entirely wrong. Robbie wanted to be somewhere else, someone with a broader frame of reference than Toms River, New Jersey, and his language was part of that aspiration -- "bruv," "coo," "chuffed," "nnice," the double letters his written signature.

For all his wanderlust, Robbie was deeply rooted in community. He attended 110 eZabel events, tried to organize trips to the Scandinavian Festival in Stanhope, invited people to Pravda in SoHo and to Damien Rice concerts at MSG, and genuinely wanted to connect with people offline. He was the guy who showed up at the district convention hoping to run into old friends and spent the whole time walking aimlessly, disappointed he only spotted one familiar face. His interactions with malibu in the early days were endearingly earnest -- teaching her Norwegian phrases, inviting her to the Scandinavian fest, sharing his surfboard lament. He contributed 557 comments to Musings alone, making him a bonafide regular in the forum that functioned as eZabel's living room. He posted his own poetry, shared Flickr albums from concerts in London and Manchester, and once typed out the complete lyrics to Billy Bragg's "A New England" because the song moved him and he thought it might move you too.

eZabel Personality Type: INFP — "The Idealist." There was a real sweetness to Robbie beneath all the encyclopedic music knowledge and the restless nomadism. He was the guy who corrected his own unemployment claim because honesty mattered more than an extra hundred dollars a month, even when the clerk did not commend him for it. He was the guy who discovered a fellow Witness's home while running an open house and felt a quiet sense of wonder at the coincidence. He was the guy who, after two car accidents, a band breakup, and losing his last grandparent in the span of a few weeks, turned to a Boredoms concert as medicine for the soul -- and then apologized for getting emotional about it online. Active from 2002 through 2013, with 2,179 comments across both accounts and a peak year in 2006, Robbie was one of the site's most prolific and singular voices -- a man perpetually in transit, perpetually discovering, perpetually sharing what he found with anyone willing to listen.