Onlangs reviewden wij het nieuwste album van Astpai "heart to grow" positief. Omdat we de mogelijkheid kregen een interview af te nemen met mannen van Astpai hebben we die kans dan ook gegrepen. Hieronder vinden jullie hun antwoorden en onze vragen.
Hey there. We’re astpai, a punkrock/hc fourpiece from wiener neustadt, eastern Austria. We’ve originally been a band since 2001, but started to play more shows/tours from 2004 when our second guitarist marco joined the band. Since then we put out three full lengths, a split record, and two seven inches, toured all around Europe, USA and parts of Canada.
The name has it’s own kinda silly story. When we were about 13 years old and started to play instruments together as a band, we only came up with pretty terrible bandnames. One day a friend of ours was drawing over an eastpak sticker in school and what remained where the letters a.s.t.p.a.i. – knowing that we wouldn’t come up with a better idea at that time, we just adopted it and stuck with it until today. Yep. Well, actually it means “All Systems Turn Power Against Innocence”, or something.
We’re damn excited about it. “Heart To Grow” definitely is our best output so far and it’s pretty exciting to finally have a the LP and the CD in hands after a long time of waiting for it to finally be put out. Lyricwise I’m really happy with the result, as it was the first time, I felt really comfortable writing about certain things in a very personal way. Also I’m really stoked that we actually managed to get a bunch of our friends from other bands we like into the studio to record some additional vocals. In the song “Carne(t)vores ATA” you’ll hear quite a bunch of different lead vocals.
Well, we’ve done 7 tours through Europe by now and it was amazing to see, that with every trip we’ve met new people at the shows, new promoters, stayed in touch with the old ones and made great and true friends throughout the years. The last tour we did was together with a great band called Brackets Closed who are from Austria as well. We did a short 12-day-trip throughout western Europe and the UK and it’s been a blast.
Wow, that’s hard to answer. There have been so many impressions throughout the years, so many great places and people and then also some sketchy or plain areas where – it seems – nothing’s really going on. It would be totally ridiculous trying to name them all, but there’s definitely a small pool of cities we always love to come back to, be it because of the local punk scene or the city itself. That’s places like berlin, Philadelphia, lansing Michigan, Prague, Ljubljana, graz, Budapest, London, brighton, Portsmouth, Bristol, etc… I’m especially in love with the whole uk scene, so you could basically count the whole island.
You mean what people think about us back home? Things are going well at the moment. We’re happy to be coming from a great background here in wiener neustadt, eastern Austria. There’s a lot of great bands like RENTOKILL, SOEY, BRACKETS CLOSED and we have a really nice and welcoming community that puts on shows together, plays in bands and loves to hang out. Also the scene in graz, Austria is pretty remarkable. There’s a great venue called SUB, which is an autonomist place, run by a bunch of amazing people that are also heavily politically active. People support the shows and the bands, because they love the music and the ideology.
Donate everything but maybe 100.000 euros to buy a nice and working van, pay some rents in advance and enough ready meals for the next 5 years, haha.
Sure. make sure there’s always space for (sub-) cultural content in your hometown. put on shows, do fanzines, form bands! Never use your hometown as an excuse to sit on your ass and be sad about there being no scene. Get active and support the people/bands around you that share the same ideology! Stay positive!
