MASQUE OPERA!

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. "

Keeping the dark gothic sensibility of Velvet Noose and transitioning to a wholly electronic sound set Masque Opera vastly apart from bands in the south bay, and even most of what was going on in the LA scene generally.
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."

Josh continued to make music getting deeply involved in the noise scene in LA at the time, with Moth Drakula, Ex Jesus and collaborating with many others.  Freddy continued to make music under his own name, as This Song Is A Mess, But So Am I, and as Former Ghosts, and now lives in the Czech Republic. Enjoy the Masque Opera demo!

Special thanks to Joey DeStefano for uploading the demo to youtube and scanning the artwork for me. 

FROM.!

Download: From. - Demo

(youtube link at the bottom of the post)

From. was an eclectic surf-influenced band from Redondo Beach, California.  Though short lived, they were instrumental in the development of the scene that most of the bands I have written about so far were a part of. I talked to drummer Sean Johnson and guitarist Daniel Woods.
Sean, Daniel, and bassist Dan McLeod had been playing in bands for years before coming together to form From.  Sean started playing drums at age 11, and was in his first band in the 6th grade.  One of his earliest was a ska band with Dan McLeod called Nasty Nate, a reference to the movie Half Baked.  He later replaced Matt Larrabee as drummer in the punk band Code 7 along with Tony Conte and Sean Loeffler.
Sean:

"In a weird way Sean Loeffler inspired me to pave my own way and book shows. He definitely hustled booking shows for us, and even though we were playing like the Whiskey pay-to-play stuff, that drive really inspired me to move on to the next level." 

After Code 7 broke up, Sean started playing with Daniel Woods.  Woods had begun playing guitar around 1996-7, around the same time that he was going to see local punk shows at the now defunct Wolves Den.
Daniel W:

"What got me wanting to play guitar were two things, Kurt Cobain, and I remember listening to All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix and I just couldn't believe that was a guitar, and I thought, 'that sounds really cool, I want to learn how to do that.'"

Their first performance together was in a "jokey 80's metal cover band" for their high school battle of the bands, but they quickly went in another direction.
Sean:

"I had always wanted to be in a straight up surf band, just a real simple surf group, so Daniel and I wrote this thing called Graveyard Stomp that we submitted to KROQ for some Halloween competition.  They never played it on the radio but it sort of got a bug up our butt to start writing music.  So we started writing simplistic surf music.  Then once McLeod decided to stay in the band with us we started getting a little more weird."

The first show as From. was in February of 2002, at the Knights of Columbus hall in Redondo Beach with Playground Warfare, Scarpochi, Fade Scene, and Odella.

They immediately stood out among other South Bay bands because of their unusual, eclectic, and sometimes nonsensical-seeming style.
Sean:

"Our influences were so vast… It started with surf and on the surface it was always surfish with Daniel's tone, and I like playing surf beats, but we started integrating our other influences like Frank Zappa, Mr Bungle, some of the jazz we were listening to at the time." 

Shortly after forming, they recorded their 6 song demo.
Sean:

"We recorded the demo in our high school band room.  I was working on recording stuff in high school and our band teacher let us spend the weekend in the band room, lock the door, be there and record it, so we just knocked it out in a weekend.  Our friend Dominique did the artwork, she did it on a scratch board.  On the top right there's a little head with glasses… that's her.  She did a really good job!"

From. continued to play shows regularly around the South Bay at venues like Sacred Grounds and Suzy's, as well as out of town in places like Arts in Action in Downtown LA.  In the summer of 2002, they went on a brief West Coast tour with Two Minute Hate.
During that same summer, From. got together with Jon Hylander of Two Minute Hate to record their album.
Sean:

Jon was learning to record stuff at that point and wanted to record us as practice, so we went ahead and recorded every song we had.  And that turned into "Copernicus".

Because of some difficulties with the pressing plant, however, From's debut album did not see the light of day while they were together as a band.
Sean:

"[Copernicus] didn't get released until a year later because the pressing plant I hired ripped me off.  I payed for it and then they went out of business.  I had to threaten to sue them… I had talked to a lawyer because I was calling them and calling them and no answer.  Then I had my dad pretend to be a lawyer and threaten to sue them, and slowly but surely we ended up getting the product.  Sort of my first foray into learning the shadiness of some of the music world."

Despite the problems releasing it, Sean looks back on the album fondly.
Sean: 

"I listen to [Copernicus] now, and in a way I think its some of the best stuff I've ever done.  There's no pretense."

 

By November 2002, From. was ready to call it quits. 
Daniel W:

"Dan McLeod decided that he didn't want to do it anymore.  He wanted to jam with some other guys.  I think he thought of it as a drag to have to practice all the time.  I think it was too much for him at the time.  Then he went to Humboldt.  That might have been part of it, knowing that he wanted to move up to Humboldt, he just didn't want to put in the effort anymore."

Sean and Daniel Woods quickly formed Vaudeville, a band that continues to play yearly to this day.  His time playing in the South Bay scene left a lasting impression on Sean.
Sean:

"There was this ethos where you have to think about the audience, you can't be greedy.  And that was the cool thing about growing up in the South Bay and being around punk bands and not really being in a punk band, just carrying that ethos throughout my life now.  Even now, if I book a show at say the Echo I don't want to charge $10, I just feel wrong doing it, even though its sort of the norm now.  Especially Two Minute Hate, I think you guys helped shaped that in me too, and were on the same wavelength.  I'm looking at this flyer that we made in San Francisco, and I remember actually making it in San Francisco.  It's all hand-written, it's that like cut-slips-of-paper-and-paste-them-on-other-pieces-of-paper type of flyer and... It's really fun, I really miss that stuff.  It was all hands on, you hand made your own demos, or 7"s, it sounds cliche "d.i.y." but you did do it yourself, and that was a cool thing.  And that's why I started Otik Records... I'm not going to try to get From. signed, let's just  put out an album.  For better or for worse, that's what I've been doing this whole time." 

Enjoy the demo below! From.'s album Copernicus can be streamed and downloaded here, courtesy of Otik Records.

The Flyer Artwork of Steven Hoffman

Steven Hoffman was a prolific back-of-the-classroom artist in high school, and when we needed artwork for flyers, he was always more than willing to provide it.  We would paste the show info onto his drawings and run off hundreds and hundreds of copies, taking liberal advantage of Office Depot's photocopier honor system, and put them everywhere we could think of. Enjoy!