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Mind-Numbing Guitar Playing
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Take Sabbath, Zeppelin, Nirvana, Yes, Beethoven, Beatles, Steve Vai, King Crimson and Cheap Trick, throw them into a blender with some strawberries and tequila and you'll begin to understand the instrumental mayhem and confrontational antics that assault the listener's psyche on Alien Mike E.T.'s CD-R release The Furious Guitar. The original demos for the album were featured in the Mike Varney "Spotlight" column in a 1991 issue of Guitar Player, so you know you can expect guitar heaviness, an in-your-face sound, and dense, fluid guitar solos. The instrumentals are peppered with voiceovers, samples, burps and other sonic naughtiness, enough to warrant his own explicit lyrics sticker - but the focus is on serving up the guitar in as many ways as possible to entertain a world that frankly needs more guitar. Hats off Captain Freak!
Michael Trapp (a.k.a. Mike E.T., a.k.a. Captain Freak) has been kicking around the music scene for years. He started playing guitar at age eight, jamming with guitar bands by age twelve. Michael has attended Mannes College of Music in Manhattan and graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. For those four years he focused exclusively on practicing and writing music. After graduation he played in some heavy progressive chops bands in N.Y.C. and L.A. such as Danse Macabre, DreamSpeak, The Fringe and Dreamer. All broke up due to internal differences just as they were getting press and an audience. Fed up with bands in general he became a hired gun, becoming the second guitarist in Eddie Ojeda's (Twisted Sister) band. He put together his own studio and recorded The Furious Guitar, which was featured in a Guitar Player magazine piece. Since then, Michael has written and demoed the entire "Captain Freak" album.
With his current recording studio, Trapp has everything he needs to write and record anything and is looking to get his music into film and television projects. He plans to write and record until his last breath.
Contact Information
Michael Trapp
907 Penn Estates
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301
United States
E-mail:
Alien Mike E.T.
Web site:
www.geocities.com/crimsonfaced
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Pedal To The Metal
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OK, not exactly metal, but it made a better headline than "Pedal To The Hard Rock". The CD-R release from Speed Limit 35 is entitled Shifting Gears, and what you'll hear from New Jersey based guitarist Steve Rabeler and Florida based keyboardist Mitch Gorman is guitar-oriented instrumental rock recorded in separate home studios, put together via instant messenger, FTP and e-mail! Rabeler and Gorman have taken elements of progressive rock, heavy metal, surf, rockabilly, and heck, even surfabilly to build a musical gumbo that will get you changing lanes faster than a caffeine-charged, Saab-driving, gear-grinding, perpetually-late, mega commuter. There isn't much like this on the music scene at the moment - the success or failure of Speed Limit 35's marketing will ultimately determine if such a mix was a good idea or not - but with so many 'me-too' cookie cutter albums that reek of sameness out there, their fresh approach sounds like it just might take.
Speed Limit 35 was formed during the summer of 1997 in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Mitch and Steve met while working as software developers for a computer sciences company, and discovered they both owned and loved Saab automobiles. Discussions of cars turned to discussions of guitars. Steve bought a 4-track mini-disc recorder - Mitch picked up a new acoustic guitar and a synthesizer, and they began jamming, writing, and recording songs. After three years of work, SL35's first CD "The Speed Of Sound" was released in August of 2000. This CD featured the contributions of singer/lyricist Judilynn Niedercorn and guitarist John Walker. It received very positive reviews, and more than 90,000 downloads on the MP3.com website.
Since October 2003, the band's song "HTML" has been featured in California Polytechnic University's new online virtual view book. In April 2004, Shifting Gears, the band's second CD, was released on Hectic Eclectic Records.
Contact Information
Steve Rabeler
1309 Larchmont Place
Mt. Laurel, NJ 08054
United States
E-mail:
Speed Limit 35
Web site:
www.speedlimit35.com
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