Well, do ya?Began to help bands get more of the attention they definitely deserve. Check it out!
After a long break of posting anything on here, I’ve decided to start promoting good music through tumblr once more. Kind of a stupid little update considering I have so few followers, but whatever haha
While I decide what I’m to post on here next, please enjoy a picture of my brand new baby sister, of whom I am 19 1/2 years elder, born yesterday :)
She’s fucking beautiful…
Awh, you are too kind :)
The Menzingers - Cold Weather Gear 2007
I don’t normally reblog,but god damn,I love thisband and this song sooo fucking much.
Alright, first interview I’ve conducted in quite some time! So I was fortunate to talk with Zock of Astpai, a kickass hardcore punk rock band from Austria. If you haven’t heard of them, I highly recommend you check them out immediately here.
Welp, hope you all enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed interviewing!
1. Alright, first question! I’ve wondered this since I first heard your music. How did you guys get the name Astpai?
this is just a really silly story involving two kids starting to make music, their terrible english at that time, an eastpak sticker and a marker. basically what happened was that we just couldn’t come up with a proper name that we’d be happy with so we decided to roll with the remains of a sticker that a friend of mine had drawn on. damn, that was almost 11 years ago now.
2. I just recently heard of you guys maybe two months ago, but when I heard “Heart To Grow”, I was hooked. The writing, lyrically and instrumentally, is phenomenal. What is your song-writing process like?
thank you very much. well, the writing process for Heart To Grow was pretty traditional i’d say. it was pretty much me writing all the basic structure to the songs and then working it out with the others. some songs didn’t even have lyrics and or vocal lines when we hit the studio, which is something i really like about recording, as you get to be really creative when it comes to making lyrics suit a song.
3. How are your live shows, usually? Judging off of some videos I saw, they seem pretty wild.
i don’t think that there’s such a thing as usual shows. we’ve been playing quite a lot of shows in so many different places throughout the last couple of years. we’ve had wild shows in the ukraine as well as in the usa, austria or greece.
4. Touring’s definitely gotta be one of the best parts of being in any band. What are your favorite/least favorite things about touring?
touring indeed is a really fulfilling and fun part of being in a band. it’s great to play, it’s great to set up gear, it’s great to drive…i even love the whole loading in and out part. i guess you have to feel passionate about the entire experience to fully enjoy and appreciate it. there’s only a few things that can make touring a bit hard. having no food at a show for example, or not getting a place to sleep or having some drunk idiot fucking up the whole show for everyone else by being respectless and/or violent.
5. Any funny or interesting tour stories?
there sure are many stories that i love to recall in my head every once in a while but i’m not exactly sure if they sound interesting to people on the outside. but basically there’s stories from epic drives throughout the most beautiful landscapes, to a drunk bandmember pissing all over his bandmates in the van and not remembering it the next day.
6. One of the questions I ask every band I interview haha: If you had to continuously tour with one other band exclusively for 10 years, dead or alive, who would it be?
well since we’re three years in with them already i’d pick our soulmates in ONE WIN CHOICE from philadelphia. we did 5 tours so far and there’s clearly no end in sight! we love those guys.
7. You guys recently released a split with The Flatliners, who happen to be one of my favorite bands. What was it like working with them?
the flats are awesome! we’ve been playing euro shows with them every now and then from 2008 on and this time we actually got asked to play all the germany and austria dates with ‘em. so toni (our drummer/laserlife records) asked them about a split and from there everything went really smooth and easy. they did a cover of our song “Southwards” and we did “Meanwhile, In Hell…”. we all were and still are super stoked!
8. Who musically influences you the most?
definitely bands like None More Black, Trial By Fire and Kid Dynamite. i’m heavily in love with AC/DC as well, so they also find their way into the songs sometimes.
9. How do you guys traditionally spend your time when not on tour?
i’m working at a funeral home when i’m home, which is kind of a morbid job, but it gives me all the freedom to tour whenever. also i work as a drum/guitar tech during the summer, which also helps me to financially survive. bernhard is working as well, while marco and toni are students. if i don’t work i put on shows in our hometown wiener neustadt and vienna.
10. In every band, members come and go. I recently read that you guys solidified your lineup with members of Brackets Closed after certain members left the band. How was that transition for you?
2011 was actually a bit mental regarding line up changes. our original drummer and bassist pretty much quit in december 2010, so marco and i decided to take the chance to play with changing musicians throughout 2011 (3 different drummers, 4 different bassists) also we didn’t have anyone in mind that would have been right to fully join the band when the other guys left. i mean, actually, our now drummer toni was always our first choice, but he was busy with a million other bands.
so anyway, the line up right now definitely feels like the strongest since our original line up which is just awesome.
11. What is a goal that you guys as a band want to accomplish, but haven’t had the chance to yet? Whether it be touring in a certain country, working with a certain band, etc.
wow, that’s a tough question. i think we’d all love to tour japan once. that’s kinda what comes to my mind first, haha. other than that we’re not really thinking about future accomplishments and i guess that’s the best thing to do most of the time, as it keeps you focused on what you’re doing right now, which eventually gets you a step further - as in, getting your band to be more active - anyway.
12. What is a goal you guys had as a band that has been accomplished?
it has always been our goal to keep on writing new songs as soon as recent ones have been recorded. luckily we didn’t run out of ideas yet. i guess touring the states kind of was some sort of goal for us. years ago, none of us would have ever thought we’d leave austria for a show and now we’re playing all these foreign places. it rules.
13. When did you decide that you wanted to play in a touring band?
i think that was around the time when marco joined the band on second guitar. before that we had played a few local shows every year and that was it. our first tour that lasted longer than a week was in february 2007. that marked the definite start to our regular touring.
14. Would you ever want to do anything other than make music?
of course. we all got different interests as well. although it seems that my interests all circle around music, be it playing an instrument myself or working for other bands. i’m sure marco will be an awesome biologist (he studies biology and resource management) some day. bernhard will probably use his skills to fix and build just about everything imaginable and run his own business (at least that’s where i see him at some point, haha) and toni actually might be drumming for his whole life. he’s probably the most passionate musician i’ve ever met.
15. Has being in a band taught you guys any important life lessons?
from having to work together as four individuals in a small practise room to metting new people with sometimes different cultural habits, being in a band, especially a touring band, taught us so many important life lessons. i’m sure noone of us would have ever had the chance to experience all this on his own.
16. I remember my first punk rock show as a kid, it was an awesome experience that made me want to do music for the rest of my life. What was the first show you can remember going to that made you decide “wow, this is awesome, I wanna do that too”?
for me it was the show of a local band called “My Moral Majority”. they broke up in late 2002, but when i first saw them in may 2001, it was the most energetic moment i had experienced until then. i simply couldn’t believe that those four guys on stage, that sounded so freaking awesome were all living in the same small ass town as me. it totally blew my mind.
17. Are there any older Astpai songs that you guys normally don’t play live anymore? I understand that as a band ages, some of the oldest material gets kind of pushed back from time to time.
shit, actually there are way too many of them. we just talked about this last week. playing with the flatliners motivated us to practise more of the old songs again, just so we can play them if we feel like it. the flats would always play different sets and they’d always accept requests from the audience. at least that’s how it seemed. i’m still very impressed by that. but now we’re going to hit the studio again, which will leave us to choose from four full lengths and two ep-releases. and it’s not like our live sets are getting drastically longer over the years. we still have to work with 30-40 minutes per show, which makes perfect sense.
18. How has Astpai changed musically since you all started 11 years ago?
haha, trust me, you wouldn’t want to listen to the first recordings. to be honest, they actually weren’t THAT bad musically. it’s just that i had no clue what to do with my voice, or how to use it. i also had no concept of the english language whatsoever, so most of the lyrics sucked. but to fully answer your question: of course we changed a lot musically. when you start making music you just stick to the few plain riffs and melodies you can actually play right. nowadays we can finally play the music we’d always hoped to play, haha, and we’re definitely still learning and - hopefully - improving.
19. What have you guys been working on since your latest release? Any plans for a new record or 7” any time soon?
our last release was the split with the flatliners in september. we’re now busy practising all the new songs for the upcoming recordings, which will end up as another full length record, as mentioned before. before that, there will also be a very exclusive split release in early 2012, but i can’t really say much about it at this point.
20. Okay, last question! Do you have any words of wisdom or final thoughts you’d like to share with the readers of this interview?
haha, i’m not sure if we have any words of wisdom for you, but we’d like to make sure, that y’all know, that we highly appreciate all the support we got throughout the past years and still get every day. be it every single person at a show, people randomly messaging us about records, shows, etc., people doing interviews with us (thanks again btw) or old friends still coming out to our shows every once in a while. at this point in our lifes, this here means everything to us and we enjoy every single moment of it. so thank you.
I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Astpai for taking the time to answer these questions and for making such awesome music. Zock’s an incredibly nice dude, and it was a pleasure being able to talk with him. Show your support by checking out their official website over at http://www.astpai.org, where you can listen to all of ”Heart To Grow”, along with an EP and their split with The Flatliners.
Thanks for reading, and thanks again Astpai for doing this!
-Conner
Star Fucking Hipsters - “Death is Never Out of Fashion”
From their new release, “From the Dumpster to the Grave”! Great album, catchy as fuck ska riffs and great vocal work. Very glad to hear these guys return to more of their ska/punk material!
Astpai - “Meanwhile, In Hell… (Cover of The Flatliners)
As promised, here is the second half to this beautiful split. Astpai changed the song up quite a bit, but in a fucking fantastic way, I love it.
The Flatliners - “Southwards (Astpai Cover)”
From their newly released split with Astapi! Each band did a cover of the others and put them together on 250 beautiful records. Seriously, this split made my nipples hard listening to it. No. Fucking. Joke.
I’ll post Astapi’s cover of “Meanwhile, In Hell…” tomorrow, so for now enjoy my all-time favorite band’s cover of “Southwards”!
