Washington-Palooza
theULTIMATEsketch was the main act at Washington-palooza on Friday, April 23rd, an event hosted by the Red Bull corporation. The organization catered food and drinks to the hundreds of college students from the area that were in attendance. The band, who has been together since 2008, played a set of their raw, unique songs. Two of the band members, Alex Busi and Sean Szollosi, talked about their influences, their plans and their history.
Busi, who plays bass and provides some of the vocals, said, “Daily influences for me are just sounds. In the movie, August Rush, the guy hears music through traffic and everyday occurrences – that’s pretty much me all the time. I’ve invested more than two-thirds of the money I’ve ever made into instruments, amps and recording gear. I’ve learned from experience that you can’t make a living doing anything other than what you truly love”.
The group believes music has became a case of the “loudness wars”.
Szollosi, guitarist and main vocalist, said, “Music evolves every decade. But now, the waveforms are much bigger because people are listening to music mostly from computers or iPods, which is suited for louder compressed tracks because speakers are smaller. People like Lil’ Wayne use digital recording so you can see how industry is working in their favor. Ten years ago though, Nirvana was recording straight to tape… listen and you can hear the distinct difference”.
They have many plans for the next few years however.
“We want to come out with a more successful second and third album. We would want to produce more up and coming artists, hopefully open up a studio with a label attached to it. The ultimate banger is that we want to secure financing to send theULTIMATEsketch to Africa, to Morocco, to Cape Town and spend a couple years on the coast. Our lifelong project is to install water purification system in along the way to places that need it as a means of being able to afford our first tour”.
