Q&A: Laser Cats

Posted by Sam Podio in Music

The student band that calls themselves The Laser Cats is made up of four SFUAD Contemporary Music majors. Daniel Mench-Thurlow plays the upright bass, Kyle Driscoll plays the guitar, Matt Ruder also plays guitar, Sam Armstrong-Zickefoose plays the banjo and Konor Hunter-Crump plays the violin. Jackalope Magazine had the opportunity to talk to the band members about their music.

Jackalope Magazine: How did you get into music?

Sam Armstrong-Zickefoose: My family is in a bluegrass band, all of my uncles and most of my cousins, which is 20 or 30 musicians total. We’ve always been playing bluegrass and my uncle plays banjo, so I picked one up.

JM: How did your band get together?

Matt Ruder: Well, when we were freshman Sam got asked to provide music for a creative writing thing so he asked me and Kyle to help him out. It was just going to be for that one time. We needed a name, and Kyle was wearing a shirt with a cat shooting lasers from its eyes, so we said we’d call ourselves the Acoustic Laser Cat Jazz Trio. But then we added Konor and changed it to just The Laser Cats and about a year later added Dan.

JM: What are the best and worst things about being in a band?

MR: The best part is that it feels like family. You can be friends with someone but it just becomes deeper when you’re in a band with them.

Kyle Driscoll: The only bad thing I would say is that sometimes it’s time consuming and that we all want to do The Laser Cats plus so many other things.

JM: What type of band are you?

MR: Gypsy Jazz, which all started back with the gypsies in Romania. It was a style of jazz that was very swingy that emerged out of acoustic instruments.

JM: Who writes your songs?

Konor Hunter-Crump: We all contribute.

MR: Yeah, most of what we play is just standards, but we’ve been writing more recently and somebody will have a melody and some chords and they bring it to rehearsal and we just play around with it.

SAZ: Yeah, we all write individually, but once we have the basic bread and butter, then the group will say, ‘it would be cool if we did this.’

JM: Why should people come to your shows?

KHC: Because we’re awesome.

SAZ: There aren’t really any other gypsy jazz bands like us that play where we play.

MR: And most of our gigs involve food. You have to buy the food, but it’s super romantic.

JM: What’s your favorite thing about the Contemporary Music Program?

SAZ: Steve [Paxton].

MR: Steve, yeah.

KD: Also the fact that it has a variety of ensembles. No other school has a Balkan ensemble and a gamelan ensemble.

JM: What’s the coolest thing your band has done?

MR: We haven’t broken up yet.

SAZ: We go to Ihop sometimes.

MR: Well, we’re writing music for a TV pilot right now so that’ll be cool.

JM: What’s next for your band?

MR: Finish our EP. We have some originals and we’re trying to get a few more down. We’ve got a lot of studio time already booked this semester. It’s cool because as we learn to record, we can just record ourselves and kill two birds with one stone.

Everyone can check out The Laser Cats on Facebook here!