That Whole Noise Thing
Interview With Die Rockers Die
Los Angeles
From Issue 2.1, September/October 2005
The early sounds of Los Angeles band Die Rockers Die sounded like a head trip, something to space out on while staring at a blank white wall.
And perhaps that’s the point to all this experimental, yet highly brainy music the current seven-member lineup, want to get across: The idea of wiping the slate clean of words and getting down to instrumental communication.
“Most of the music before, was drug induced,” said Champoy Hate, singer and guitarist on the sound of the older Die Rockers Die music. “The people who appreciated it, had to be high.”
Now, however, people don’t have to be high to get it and as long as people approach Los Angeles band Die Rockers Die with an open mind, the band’s experimental take on the art of sound, is interesting to say the least, of their musical talents.
Their songs, such as “Anything is Possible” or “No More Revolutions,” sound like improvisational stunts by a bunch of musicians sorting through their respective instruments’ musical capabilities.
Die Rockers Die includes the talent of Hate whom bassist Drew de Ramos calls the “brainchild,” backup vocalist and percussionist Lia Montalvan, guitarist Oliver Dammasch, guitarist Jong Nen, drummer and saxophonist Frank Velez, and drummer and percussionist Ryan.
The band formed in the winter of 2002, broke up in February 2005 and then reconnected a few months later in April. Die Rockers Die is part of the Cough Syrup Collective, a collection of bands and other artists.
Unique to this band is their constant pushing of the envelope in what they feel is viable music.
“This band is constantly evolving,” said Hate. “It’s challenging people’s opinion of what the elite rock crowd deems as cool. It’s the whole trying to give people a different perspective of things with the whole noise thing. Avant garde-shit like that.”
While the band members are verbally very heavy, the sound of their music is built upon a lot of repetition in chords and beats that ultimately lead up to a more climatic sound.
Die Rockers Die however, has had some resistance in breaking into some crowds to “challenge people’s opinion.”
Take for example, one of their more recent performances at Plush in Fullerton, as an example of one of this band’s challenges in getting people to listen to them even for a second.
According to Hate, the lineup Die Rockers Die played with at Plush that evening, consisted mostly of emo bands.
“A lot of bands,” said Hate, “concentrate on being in a band rather than making the music. It’s that whole thing with the finger to the moon: People mistake their finger with the moon.”
However, no one can really lay claim that the members of Die Rockers Die are mistaking their fingers for the moon, or fishing to be the “next big thing” with some pie in the sky idea of where their band will go.
An online review of a Die Rockers Die show from 2003 on indieculturerecords.net claimed that “Die Rockers Die has no commercial value.”
However, none of that really matters to the band.
“We’re trying to redefine what a band is. People are so campy,” said Hate of the various scenes he believes people begin to subscribe to and believe in more than the music itself.
Their favorite show as a collective group seemed to be one they played in Long Beach where they turned the volume of their amps and other instruments up to maximum and were told by the show’s organizer to turn down the volume or play their last song.
Die Rockers Die chose to end on an ultra loud note by repeating the same riff at the loudest volume.
And then they left.
The band name, which Hate and Dammasch liked for its aesthetically pleasing symmetry (when written on paper), has to do with the death of the ego (and rockstar ego) once people die.
Though complex in both conversation and in music, several of the members who were present for the interview that took place in a garage in the early evening before their show at The Derby (on Los Feliz), started out in bands many (who may find the quotes in this article ultra-heavy and deep) could relate to.
Dammasch used to play in a band that took its cues from Weezer. De Ramos and Hate used to play in punk bands.
However, time or maybe inevitable evolution of musical taste occurred and what resulted was obviously Die Rockers Die.
“What’s the whole point of punk,” asked Hate. “If it’s about being yourself, why do you have to go through all this effort [to look a certain way].”
Incidentally Hate seems to want something more than just to duplicate the same sounds of the past saying that most bands who play for the sake of sounding like someone else make “no effort to transcend that.”
And in a way Die Rockers Die might be attempting to do that on a personal level for the musicians involved, but the members don’t seem all too certain that it’s about persuading people to believe the musicians have broke the wall in creating something beyond what has already been made.
“How can [our music] be different,” said Montalvan when pressed for what makes Die Rockers Die different from other bands. “It’s just sound.... We’re different because Frank, the drummer is sleeping.” (Frank was actually sleeping throughout the entire last half of the interview.)
“It’s hard to be different, but as long as you’re having fun, it doesn’t matter,” added Dammasch.
In the end, the easiest thing one can latch onto in attempting to understand what this band is all about, is simply in their name-the death of the rockstar, the death of genres and the death of scenes.
“Everybody is so pent up on becoming something,” said de Ramos, “that you just want to be.”