BIOGRAPHY
Guava Belly [guava belly] - noun. An exciting fixture from the San Diego beach jam-rock scene.
Guava Belly is more than the sum of it's parts. This is good because it's parts consist of five idiots and their respective noise making machines of choice. Five musicians, with five different stories and five different voices come together on one stage to form one sound of passion, fury, sweetness and fun. Remember when the robot cats from Voltron came together to form a giant invincible robot? Guava Belly is like that.... in music.
These are our stories...
Dan Hammer Guitar, Lead Vocals
Good at singing. Good at yelling. Good at drinking. The perfect front man. From Seattle, Dan brings a sensitive ear for melody which is apparent in his tasteful guitar and vocal melodies. He's also dumb enough to sometimes reject taste altogether in favor of a fiery display of rock infused noise and fury. Which is good because Guava Belly doesn't tolerate pansies. With an associates degree in audio production from the Art Institute of Seattle, when Dan talks about his monster-sized rig of effects pedals he really understands what he's talking about, and in that respect he stands apart from most musicians. A natural song-writer, Dan's lyrics betray hints of depth that belie the band's shallow and simplistic appearance. Dan grew up listening to wide range of music which incorporates everything from The Beatles to Zepplin to Disney music. It shows.
Aaron Giffin Drums and Percussion
Never trust someone who hits things for a living. Aaron is no exception to this rule unless you need somebody to lay down a beat with some bounce. In this respect he is a metronome. Granted a metronome that gets louder and faster as it gets more excited, but that's how Guava Belly likes metronomes to be. Hip-hop, jazz, rock, polka.... whatever. Giff plays them all with a rock-steady groove that often is the one thing maintaining order in the band, when live shows go awry. Giff played jazz and rock back in upstate New York before coming to San Diego to pursue a career as a teacher. Somehow he messed up and wound up as a rock-star instead. Future generation's loss. Present generation's gain. Giff likes to steal drum riffs from Wilco, The Grateful Dead and Phish.
Mike Pritchard Keys, Synth, Samples, Vocals
Pritch brought the funk. Didn't matter that nobody asked for funk. Pritch just brought it. And the band was never the same again. Pritch took the well-trodden path to rock-god status by pursuing a physics degree in his hometown of Toronto. After graduation he spent two years building computer models to describe the formation of glacial ice sheets and somehow convinced the University of California San Diego that they needed an expert on ice sheets. They bought it and he's been surfing ever since. In between surf breaks he builds computer models to couple meso-scale cloud formation processes to global climate models, he writes mad rhymes, he plays a sick keyboard and he brings a touch of class to the band. He's inspired by Herbie Hancock, RJD2, the Herbaliser, the Navier-Stokes Equation, madvillain/madlib/lord quas, Bill Evans, MCH4, James Brown, potential vorticity, giftofgab & Herve Salter from Blackalicious, Ollie McGill from Cat Empire, Stevie Wonder, isentropic coordinates, and the Shredder from TMNT.
James Traer Bass
The touch of class Pritch brings to the band... James spends everyday trying to counteract that. Not much of a fan of music, James plays in the band for the free beers and does his best to drown out his fellow band-mates with screams, growls and any noise he can extract from the battered and splintered bass that has accompanied him from the underground punk scene of Edinburgh, to the beaches of San Diego, via a brief stint with Cambridge based rock-band Hamfatter. He currently pursues a PhD at Scripps Institute of Oceanography (along with Pritch) studying the propagation of sound through the ocean and developing new algorithms for mapping the ocean and sub-ocean sediments from ambient noise. While he hates most of the bands you like, he does have a grudging appreciation for the storytelling of Tom Waits, the fire, skill and vision of Primus and Avishai Cohen, the audacity of the Beastie Boys and Frank Zappa, the showmanship of Prince, the grandeur of Sibelius, the irreverence of the Dead Kennedy's and the Presidents of the USA, the contraptions of Thomas Truax and the hypnotic quality of jingles from TV advertisements.
Mike Villemaire Lead guitar, Vocals
Every story needs a hero, and every band needs a great guitarist. This story and this band have Mike. More comic relief than a hero, Mike is fortunately an incredible ninja master of the six-string. A blackbelt in shredjitsu. Mike is so good this band couldn't contain him and he must front the progressive-epic-power-duo Ninja Love as they battle marine mammals on stage on a weekly basis. Possibly the greatest musical creation to come from the woods of Vermont, Mike would really rather be fishing for trout than playing music. But his talent is too great to be wasted, and he must play. As a master of disguise with a terrific sense of humor and an admirable disregard for social norms Mike has appeared on-stage as a giant smurf, Steve Zissou, a leprechaun and once wearing an eerie mask of Giff's face. He denies starting the lucky charms fight at the Saint Patrick's day gig when Giff broke his leg, but the rest of the band has their suspicions. He often meditates to the soothing sounds of Phish, Tool, Cake, Pink Floyd, The Police, The White Stripes, The Darkness and The Chicago Bulls Theme Song.