About Me
In the summer of 2000, the new millennium started with a bizarre and certainly audible bang. Four Virginia Beach friends, Atom, Kenny, John, and Eddie, found themselves wasting the humid & boring summer nights after work living a veritable John Hughes script: Pool-hopping in resort hotels, nightsurfing during a record wave of shark attacks, ascending clock towers, flagrant trespassing, flagrant nudity, destruction of public and private property, almost drowing several times, and capturing it all on film. Some of them were involved in scandals. Some almost died. Some went on to start the musical enigma known as Das Kapp. It started as a joke, one such night at the Alomar Resort Inn. The four young squires sat salted, sanded, exhausted and wet after a night of evading security & local police from hotel balconies to beach. JR JDM broke out an archaic, battery-powered Casio keyboard, started mashing the keys incongruously, making pained faces and speaking in a vague eurotrash accent, "You don't understand,...this is my ART!" A facetious suggestion was made that the four of them pull this as a gag at an open mic---show up with crappy keyboards and noisemaking toys, pretend they were German, wear gas masks, and share their "art" with an unsuspecting audience until they were shut down & thrown out. Just annoy and frighten and render a solid two day ringing in everyone's ears. And in a ho-hum town were great ideas are almost never followed up and brought to life, somehow this frankenstein actually drew a breath, burped, and mutated. The first open mic-raid took place at the Jewish Mother, with Atom, John, and Eddie wearing rain suits & gas masks, toting every speaker cabinet, amplifier, cheap synth, and noise-making toy they could get their hands on. The house P.A. was trumped by Atom bringing his own. A wall of speaker cabinets was erected, plugged in, and they went to work twiddling knobs behind it, so as to thwart any challengers of the improv noise with a firing line of decibels. In a matter of 10-20 minutes, the melee ensued. The crowd of bewildered tourists and numb-noggin'd locals writhed and moaned and shouted insults that were only drowned out by abominable volume. And, just as they'd set out to do, they were promptly unplugged and asked to leave. Some weeks later, the second impromptu performance involved crashing a show at Cogan's Instant Art Bar in Norfolk, Virginia. The gas mask wearing faux-Germans pleaded to perform before the legendary Sauce Monsters and Crash Smash Explode, also asking Nic from the Crash Smashers to join in on drums, rounding out a live band with Sauce Monster Kenny on guitar. The same wall of speakers was constructed, the same gas masks and toys and cheap synths, the same colossal and reckless volume, the same drunkenly finding-the-pocket improv that had become less and less of a joke every time it was played. Cogan's Instant Art bar, although a vastly less myopic crowd, still yielded the same results in minutes flat. However this time, Das Kapp was shut down at the hands of the promoter, by tripping the circuit breaker to the building and effectively cutting power. Ah, blessed success!!!! From this moment on, with the addition of Nic and Kenny, the Das Kapp genome had mutated above and beyond the summertime joke. Late night jam sessions at Atom's house began. Hours on top of hours on top of hours of endless improv-searching between Nic, Atom, and Kenny, every moment recorded through a single condenser mic in the center of the room. After the dust setttled, Atom promised a "record" for a number of years. And truthfully, considering the idea of culling a few moments of genius from mountain ranges of crap, years it actually took. "One Mic, One Room" is the diamond, the concentration of one incredible summer that no one will forget. The naked wrestling tape has yet to resurface...
