Masque Opera - Demo CD + Comp Track
(Streaming link at the bottom of the post, Untitled comp track is download only for the time being)
Masque Opera from Redondo Beach, CA, blew me away from the first time I saw them; they were like nothing I had ever seen or heard. Two guys, one enormous sound system, and an odd bunch of electronic devices that I never really wrapped my head around. They were LOUD, dark, and intense. I interviewed Freddy Ruppert.
Freddy started going to shows early on at local places like Frogs, the Wolves' Den and TJ Charlyz.
Freddy:
"I went to shows at all the local places. When I was going to those shows I wasn't in any band or playing any music. But I would always go to Deviates shows and a lot of the 'south bay punk' shows every weekend. Then I started jamming with a friend on guitar and another friend on bass and then from there started doing bands. When I got a bit older and was in high school I started to go to shows at the old Koo's in Santa Ana and the PCH club and the Smell, Headline Records, etc. I remember being super excited about a lot of shows, like Dystopia, The Blood Brothers, Jerome's Dream, Le Shok."It was in the middle of this that he met Josh Stewart, while attending Redondo Union High School.
Freddy:
"I guess I must have been in 10th grade and he was in 9th. We became friends and started hanging out over a mutual love of crust punk and political and animal rights ideals. We shared general interests, and Josh got I into a lot of stuff I had no idea about at the time, as well as into DIY ethics."Before forming Masque Opera, the two had been in a handful of bands together, ranging from crust punk to hardcore, eventually evolving a more electronic and gothic sound in Velvet Noose, the immediate predecessor to Masque Opera.
Freddy:
"Josh and I were in Agon. It was a crust punk band, we released one demo tape and that was it. Sex Shoppe was myself on vocals, Bobby Shank on guitar, Chace Richwine on drums, Josh Stewart on bass, and Jordan Jakubowski on guitar. We released one demo tape and played a handful of shows including Koos, The Smell, a bunch of places in the south bay, and Headline Records. After Sex Shoppe came briefly Velvet Noose, a goth band that Josh and I briefly did, where it was just myself on guitar and vocals and Josh on bass and we had a drum machine for the beats. We did one show. Then came Masque Opera because we switched interest to synths, drum machines, electronics. "
Freddy:
"When I got into electronic music, Josh and I were just listening to a lot of Skinny Puppy. So it sort of inspired us to ditch the guitars and start buying synths and drum machines and see what we could piece together. We had no idea what we were doing just that we wanted to make stuff. The only other band in L.A. around the time of doing Masque Opera that I felt like we fit with was Babyland. We were constantly going to all the Babyland gigs, gave them a demo CDR and then started to play shows together. "
The equipment the band used evolved over the course of playing together, but was anchored down by their incredibly loud, human-sized P.A. speakers.
Freddy:
"It was a bit of a pain in that we bought our own huge P.A. system because most of the places didn't have a good enough sound system to be as loud as we wanted to be. So we had to carry that fucking thing around everywhere, two huge tower speakers and a big power amp and a mixer. Other than that, in the beginning we had a boss drum machine, some electribe samplers, a yamaha cs2x synth, and a yamaha dx7 synth. After that, we started to get into computer music and Josh gradually introduced a laptop."Despite being an odd fit, Masque Opera played frequently around the south bay, LA, and beyond. In early 2003, however, Josh started school at the SF Art Institute, and because of that, and the fact that both he and Freddy were ready to move on creatively, the band came to an end.
Freddy:
"It basically ended because we sort of kind of got into different stuff and went different ways and maybe it sort of felt like we didn't have somewhere else to go with it."
Special thanks to Joey DeStefano for uploading the demo to youtube and scanning the artwork for me.