Zeal is 23 year-old Robert Jarvis. He’s a multi-instrumentalist who completely missuses his jazz degree by creating experimental pop music in his bedroom and making stop-motion animation on his bedroom floor.
2006 saw his track Salt chosen as the opening track on the Noise compilation Emergent, leading to airplay on national and community stations and eliciting bursts of interest around the country. A short while later he was chosen as the feature artist on TripleJ Unearthed meaning he now had more myspace friend requests than ever before. Friends made him happy.
Still 2006, and in an effort to distract himself from the uni work piling up around him, Robert set out to do something he’d never done before – make a music video. He had the song, Salt, and he had the concept… salt. Eighty dollars of rock salt, in fact. He spent five weeks wrapping desk lamps in coloured cellophane, crawling around on his bedroom floor, taking photo after photo of salt and in the end was left with a worrying amount of uni work to get done… and a film clip! Quite an achievement. The clip found it’s first audience, being featured in the Sunscreen music video competition. It then lent Robert his first chance to walk down a red carpet being nominated for Best Music Video at the South Australian Short Screen Awards. Pretty impressive for a first effort. Even more impressive, in 2007 Salt was selected for screening at SoundKilda as part of the St Kilda Film Festival amongst the top music videos in Australia – Gotye, Augie March, Sarah Blasko… and Zeal.
After having enough schmoozing with beret wearing film maker types, Robert got back to his music making and has now completed his début EP ‘This is how I hear your voice’, tracks of which have already been receiving significant airtime on RRR, PBS, FBi and TripleJ’s Home and Hosed and Sound Lab. ‘This is how I hear your voice’ features Hilltop Hoods Initiative winner Subsketch and Melbournite one-man-indie-band The Birth of Jose.