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Concert Review in Kerrang!
Rating 4/5
The queue outside the Roxy is unbelievably long. Hordes of bedraggled kids are despondantly hoping to obtain elusive tickets for tonight's show. The club's manager is panicking, screaming at the girl in the ticket office: "I don't care WHAT they tell you, the guest list is CLOSED!".Inside, the hemmed-in crowd has heated the venue beyond human tolerance levels. By the time local rising stars, Human Waste Project bound onstage gaily, the pressure cooker is in full effect. For someone who has written so many songs about being a slave to love, dreadlocked singer Aimee Echo maintains an intoxicatingly gleeful, girlish quality. She can belt out a scolding refrain to an ex-lover, as she does during 'Slide' and 'Exit Wound' - both standouts from 'e*lux', HWP's forthcoming debut album - and make it sound like a polite request for a shandy. But that's what guitarist Mike Tempesta, drummer Scott Ellis and bassist Jeff Schartoff are there for. Tempesta (whose brother, White Zombie drummer John, watches proudly from the audience) prods his guitar angrily, wringing unearthly whines and pleas from the suffering instrument; Schartoff, his face partly hidden by lengthy branches of dreadlocks,starts nearly every song off with an ominous grumble from his four string. They've been steadily gigging for almost three years now, and their following has grown and grown. Echo's charm is the bands secret weapon in a scene increasingly clogged by bands churning out a bass heavy din. She announces that she wishes she had worn trousers tonight, so that she could dance with the fans down the front. It ends too quickly, with a droning compelling cover of Depeche Modes 'I Feel You', Echo's voices shimmering in mid-air. Sweaty being fall limply to the floor. Everyone has been sufficiently Wasted.
Aimee Echo is a trooper. When the blonde haired helion tells us that she's had a bad case of flu all day-and hocks a cricket ball sized glob of phlegm across the stage to prove it-the audience stands with mouths agape, because her voice remains so strong and fluid. Her band, Human Waste Project marry Rage Against The Machineesque funk to the sonic sludge of early Nirvana, with guitarist Mike Tempesta (brother of White Zombie's John) peeling out an awesome racket. Now that HWP are signed to Disney's Hollywood Records label, watch Mickey Mouse board up his home!
Wasted
What the devil's going on with Human Waste Project?
by Jennifer VineyardWhen Human Waste Project were holed up at Indigo Ranch Studios' recording facilities this past fall, they barely escaped with their lives. Though they were warned that the Malibu fires were heading up the canyon, they disregarded the news because the messenger was a neighbor aptly named "Crazy Sally". Even with televised news reports and strong suggestions from the fire department that they evacuate, they stayed, "us being punk rock kids and all" joked lead singer Aimee Echo. The wind seemed to be going in the opposite direction, and there was a local legend about Native American rituals protecting Solstice Canyon from fire. But when flames started coming up to the windows, their producer Ross Robinson persuaded everyone to leave, making sure to grab the master copies for their Hollywood Records debut before driving down the road leading out of the boxed canyon-with fire on both sides. "It was really apocalyptic," said Seal Beach native Echo. "The sky was red and there was smoke everywhere; it was like life on Mars." When they came back they found much of the area devastated, though the are surrounding the studio was hardly burned. To Echo, that lent credence to not only the fire legend "but all sorts of other little legends" she'd heard about their recording site, including reports from bands like Korn, Sepultura, and Manhole that the place was haunted.
Even Martin Sheen had concurred when he dropped in to record a film voice-over. Though she wouldn't call herself superstitious, Echo rattled off a list of other events, like how recording commenced on a Friday the 13th, continued through a lunar eclipse, and reached mastering stage on Halloween. There was also a meteor crash nearby. "The sky lit up all green", she said, "and I seriously thought the aliens were coming down." And to top it all off the band was recording its take on the millenium in a song called "Electra" when the fires hit. "I don't want to get hippie-dippie, 'Age of Aquarius' and all, but I do believe there is a new time coming," she said, "I just think it will be more gradual, that it's actually starting to happen now." If the import of the millenium could be measured by our culture's obsession with it, then she might be right. Movies like Strange Days, TV shows like Millenium, and bands like White Zombie and Marilyn Manson all usher in darker visions-not always competently-where serial killers, rape, and satanism are all on the rise. Echo liked the Millenium pilot, where a serial killer purposefully fulfills prophesies to signal to the world that "the thousand years is over!" "But after that, they really didn't say anything," she said. "It was just about the serial killers. It got to be like a grown-up Scooby-Doo without the animation. "If it weren't for those meddling kids!' becomes "If it weren't for that meddling psychic guy!'" As for supposedly satanic messages offered by Marilyn Manson, Danzig, and the Lemonheads' Evan Dando, Echo laughs them off as gimmicks. "It's a big fucking joke," she said. "Everyone's grabbing darkness and death as a way of creating controversy." Well isn't that somewhat hypocritical, given Human Waste Project's earlier tune "Route 666" and former guitarist John Chas's prediliction for dressing up as Beelzebub when f=performing live (painted red from head to toe and wearing horns)? Echo said that was all just part of the joke when she wrote "Route 666," she was laughing at how her licsense plate and cell phone all contained the infamous number. "I personally believe that people misunderstand the bible when they think that it is the mark of the beast,"she said. "It's either the mark of the chosen or nothing at all. And I appreciate darknes but I don't think you should go gung-ho one way or the other." At times they are just as tortured and despairing as the gothest bands and just as heavy as their friends Korn (whose lead singer Jonathan once guested on a Human Waste Project cover of the Go-Go's "this town"), but the band pointedly keep a balance between dark and light on their newly finished-but not yet released-debut. Even the impending doom described in "electra" contains a sense of hope: "my body shakes electric/can't move...when i wake and shudder/to see i'm bleeding again/i feel electric again..i felt like the world was mine." Part of this comes from echo's helium-toned vocal delivery-...which sounds like a little girl who just murdered her mother: simultaneously wounded and venomous, innocent yet dangerous. "I believe in the duality of the human spirit," she said. "even people who wrong me do me a great service...help me grow." Does that include the guy who pinched her nipple at a Riverside show a year or so back when she was leaning over the crowd (and whom she promptly whacked with the mic stand)? "Well I'm a litle out of my head when I'm performing," she said. "It's more primal. And back then, I was more pissed. I thought I was so opressed, being a 'Woman in Rock'. I had a chip on my shoulder, like, "Don't even think of trying to abuse me." Now I can either sleep on the floor or in my princess bed with a teddy bear-I don't have to prove I'm tough."
Human Waste Project
"Live" review
Terrorizer Magazine UK-June 1997
Slo Burn + Human Waste Project
Los Angeles Troubador
Hollywood darlings (by way of Huntington Beach) Human Waste Project took the stage to find dozens of male types jostling for a better view of singer Aimee Echo. Unfortunately, the first couple of songs were marred by a bum vocal monitor, with Echo unable to hear herself. She just sort of winged it while she got increasingly annoyed with the situation, which was also augmented by her rule of not smoking cigarettes for 36 hours prior to a gig. After three songs, the technical wrongs were righted, and they got on with their Metal/Rock/B-Movie Horror/Whatever sound that got them a deal with Hollywood
records. Echo's voice can go from a delicate cooing to a loud caterwaul within the same song, and the band's ability to alter the musical landscape to match could take them far. Keep an ear out....
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Human Waste Project
Interview
Terrorizer Magazine UK
July 1997
Catch a band right after they've played a set, particularly if it's a shorter one, and you'll find a band in a hyper mood. And so it is with Los Angeles newcomers Human Waste Project, who just finished their support slot for Slo Burn 10 minutes ago at Hollywood's legendary Troubador nightclub. They're an eclectic mix of Punk, Hip-Hop, Rock and Metal, but all of it is distilled through a love of B-movies and schlock horror. So there's lots of humor in there huh? "Hahaha, yes!", exclaims vocalist Aimee echo, puffing happily on a post gig cigaarette, having dutifully followed her rule of not smoking 36 hours before a gig. "We're kind of wacky and zany, in a morbid kind of way." You guys must have loved the film 'Mars Attacks!', then. Echo and bassist Jeff Schartoff both happily respond affirmatively, while drummer Scott Ellis sighs that he hasn't yet seen it. Aimee continues, "I thought it was awesome! We actually have the blue velvet horse that was in the trailer in Mars Attacks! We picked it up on our first tour in Denver, in this cheesy thrift store from this really great gay guy. We carried it on the ceiling of our RV through our whole first tour, and we put it up in the studio for our whole recording session." Human Waste Project has a different sound, no mean feat with all the bands out here today. Agree or disagree? Aimee: "Actually, what happened was, all of us come from a real Punk Rock background, and we all have a real Dance and Hip-Hop side to us too, but we never intended to put a Hip-Hop vibe into anything." Scott:"We never intended to, but it comes out..." Jeff: "It was like, it grooves! That was a thing that tied it in. If its got a groove, like Public Enemy albums." Aimee: "But then you've got to get onto the newer Trip-Hop stuff, like Tricky..." Scott: "Oh yeah!" Clearly HWP is a group with much variation within its ranks, even without guitarist Mike Tempesta around to give his tuppence worth. Echo was actually a straight-A student in university who dropped out to be with the band full time, and who also became a licensed body piercer to overcome her fear of needles. A gutsy girl, especially one who could write a tortured relationship song like "Exit Wound". "It's emotional. It was really cathartic when I was in the studio recording it. Part of the experience that was the song actually happened at that studio (the famous Indigo Ranch), and I won't get into any kind of details. But it was some immense emotion. Yeah it definitely was an exit wound." Does it freak you out that you go and write a song like that, that it came out of your head, only to release it for all the world to hear? "I don't know, it kind of comes out, and I don't think that I....God, sometimes, I guess, yes. Sometimes I go, "Wow, I can't believe I actually put that out. It's more that it's out in public, than it is that I wrote it. It's more like, Oh shit, am I really going to tell people that's how I feel?" Apparently you are indeed going to do so, my dear.
Human Waste Project
Mention
Kerrang! UK-July 5, 1997
Now, have you ever heard of a band hosting an album release party four months early? Thats what happened when Human Waste Project celebrated their debut album,'Electralux', with a riotous party at the Opium Den. The LP's US release had just been pushed back to September, but that didn't stop the party plans. Spied in the crowd were members of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Failure, White Zombie,( John Tempesta's brother Mike plays guitar in Human Waste Project), and the illustrious Ms Tairrie B, herself.
Human Waste Project
interview
conducted by Ravi Kahlon-07/11/97
@ the Barn on the campus of U.C. Riverside
Human Waste Project is:
Aimee Echo: Vocals
Jeff Shartoff: Bass
Scott Ellis: Drums
Mike Tempesta: Guitar(not present during this interview
Q: How did you guys meet each other?
We didn't really get rid of them, they just kinda faded away. It had nothing to do with the music influences or the music itself, It had more to do with our personal relationships with them. Our last guitar player left for another band a while back, so were talking a couple of years ago.
Through our second guitar player John Montie (i think that's how you spell it) . Like I said he's from N.Y. , and he was a friend of mine. John started to bug out, from being in L.A. and stuff, and not being signed or having enough money.
Well to tell you the truth, it was kinda like a blessing because the guy who was handling our records wasn't really up to the task, and he wasn't doing that great of a job to begin with. Hopefully the new guys working with us will work in our favor.
It will work in our favor. The thing is, the only thing we want them
to do is put the album out and act like a label, and just do what any average label would do. That's all we want. We're probably 6 months behind schedule, which in the bigger scheme of things isn't that much, but its just frustrating right now. We were gonna play on the B-stage at Lollapalooza, but that didn't happen cuz our President got fired.
Actually Spackelle(their A&R man) followed us around for three years. It was just a whole family vibe going on, they gave us the best offer and there was no way we could break Spackelle's heart. Also, we got offers from indie labels, but basically we knew what we wanted to accompish on our first record, and who we wanted to work with as a producer. We had a vision, and we knew an indie label couldn't do it. Scott: They put us on tour before they even drew up a contract.
Q: What was touring with them like?
Jeff: It was us, them, and Man Will Surrender.
Aimee: Scott was doing double duty, playing drums with us and MWS, and it
was just this huge family vibe through the whole tour.
Q: What was the whole recording process like at Indigo Ranch studios?
Aimee:
It was so, so, weird. We started on Friday the 13th, we tracked 13 songs, got out on Halloween, lived through Malibu fire storms, we had a lunar eclipse, a meteor crash which I witnessed, and Jeff cracked his head on a rock. The whole place is like rock and roll summer camp with total wilderness. It's so beautiful
Its like a big cabin/house type of thing and its really far up into the hills. There're orchards in the front yard, its overlooking the ocean, there's a river nearby. Its so incredible.
We all met through this big circle of bands, like Korn, etc. . One of the guys I went to high school with was the tour manager then for Korn, and he introduced me. Actually, Jeff knew L.A.P.D. . Reggie played Jeff's gear on the second L.A.P.D. record. Anyway, we knew those guys for a while, and when Ross got involved with Korn, he got involved with us, and Ross got invloved with the Deftones, and then we got involved with the 'tones. Then we got involved with everyone. Its a big huge family whether its Limp Bizkit, or Grundig(Cold), it doesn't matter, its a huge family.
I was trying to learn instruments even back then. I couldn't do the singing for shit so I just kinda got into guitar. Then I moved into bass and just stuck with it. ( Jeff now has a Ernie Ball 5-string bass as well as an old Fender Precision 4 string bass).
The stuff that I really love to death is like the Cure, Tricky, Tool, Portishead, Siouxie and the Banchies, Public Enemy, The Clash, Tom Waits, Sepultura, Slayer, Soul Coughing. All knids of stuff really.
I came into this band trying to get away from any female singers as much as possible. I started out heavy because I kinda had to prove myself too because Scott didn't want a girl singer, so you could just imagine what I was thinking. Then I sorta evolved to where what comes outta me is just really me.
I knew from the beginning that she was good, and I knew everything would work itself out.
I'm not sure really. I was doing background vocals for bands when I was younger but I never thought of it as a viable career option for me. I think it started when my mom overheard me singing and she said to me, "I didn't know you could sing," and I said I can't but then I met this guy and started this thing with him. Then I lied to Jeff and told him I could sing, and he believed me. It was that whole story of how we were driving to Lollapolooza, and Jeff asked me if I could scream, and I said yes.
I was looking to start this really experimental band, cuz we use to do a lot of sequencing and sampling when we started. I wanted something in like the flavor of Tricky and Portishead with lke Skinny Puppy type heaviness (goth hop), with a tribalized rhythum and a Jane's Addiction type feel. I never thought of Aimee as a female though, I was just looking for someone who could do the job.
There are 7 brand new songs on the record, maybe 8. We had a lot of old songs, but when you start a band you don't really know what to do, and as time progresses, you start to write stuff that is true to yourself. When I started off, I use to cop a lot of the styles of male vocalists cuz I hated the girls. The girl vocalists I loved were the one's that didn't do that thing, that girlie thing. I use to love Siouxie Sioux, and PJ Harvey. (I'm not gonna tell you the names of the girl vocalists she hates. I promised her).
We were just kickin it. What happened was one person was playing an instrument, and Ross walks in and says lets do something with that. So we set up the drums, our tech was playing keyboards, our A&R guy was playing the castanettes, I started singing through a fan on a karaoke mic (she starts screaming). People think its a keyboard but its me singing.
I kept bugging Ross about doing little segways and stuff. Ross likes to do things spontaneuosly so we were all in one room, with one mic, and we did one take.
"Hold Me Down"--- its not about rough sex or anything, its about a guy who was really jealous. I let people think its sexual, but its totally mental. The relationship sucked so bad, and I just couldn't get out of it.
"Disease"--- too personal
"Electra"--- I sarted getting into alien information type stuff, and I was reading a lot of books on aliens, like "Alien Agenda", reforming your DNA and stuff, and weird things were happening. The song pretty much wrote itself. After I had written the song and titled it electra, I found out that this star (pointing to a tattoo on her wrist) was called Electra. The song was about being human and being not human, and being in a different place all together. It didn't make sense at all, so when I found out, I freaked out and starting calling all my freinds. I was into the alien stuff I thought I was gonna be committed. The album title Electralux means "star-light", electra-lux. Actually, its not gonna be called electralux anymore because of copyright infringment. Its gonna be called E-Lux.
"Shine"---(I know what its about, but I can't tell you guys. I promised Aimee. Sorry.)
Also, H.W.P said they'll, probably go on tour with the Deftones closer to the album is gonna be released, late September. They said the Deftones are gonna take them out for revenge after the chicken incident. You gotta ask them about it. I think it involves live chickens and a prediction about a cow at a show. Aimee said she gets chills thinking of the new Deftones record, and she also loves Far and Alien Ant Farm. I wanna say thanks to Human Waste Project, Spackelle, Zack, and the people at the barn for not letting me sit with the adults in the beer drinking section. Thanks you anal retentive bastards....
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