EMP Magazine Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 21

ARTIFAS cont ing for work. Cody and I ran a studio and we sold all our recording equipment. When I got to St. Louis I got on Craigslist looking for a recording gig and found somebody looking for an audio engineer, so I went and met up with them and he’s got a recording studio down in his basement and I’ve been recording him and his buddies and it’s been a blast. Did you go to school for engineering or pick it up as you went? S: Well, I’ve got a degree in music education. I used to teach high school drum lines. I was a big band nerd. Band nerds make the best metal bands, though. S: Hell yeah, man! I’ve been in studios my whole life, though, and if I wasn’t the one recording I was the one sitting right there next to the dude who was watching everything he did. I learned a lot on Youtube, too. It’s like a whole education system there. C: You learn to do just about everything on Youtube. You’ll see these 11 year old kids who know more than I do as a grown man about playing guitar and it’s like, “You’re cheating!” Which leads me to ask where you guys started learning to build a stage presence like you’ve got. C: I remember where we were when we had the first conversation about the band, actually. For my 18th birthday we went to St. Louis to see Chevelle, and on the way back, we were just brainstorming about this badass band we wanted to start. “We’ve got to have style, but we’ve got to have heavy shit, but hooks that people can sing along to,” one of those things where we dreamed about it and had all these conceptual ideas. We finally sat down to right and said, “This is that group.” S: The show itself and the energy, I think the reason it catches people so much is that somehow it’s just been a natural thing, from the first show, that’s just how we all… we just started throwing down. It’s all about giving literally everything inside of you to the crowd, to the point where you have no air in your lungs. Connect with the band at facebook. com/Artifas and twitter.com/Artifas. Check out reverbnation.com/artifas to hear the band and keep up with their upcoming shows.