11 Year Anniversary Edition

In September of 2004, eight years after the Treepeople held their last concert in São Paulo, three of the band’s members got together in DC for a weekend of free museums, beers, and skate videos. At one point, Stephen handed me a cassette tape with the words ‘master demo’ scratched on one side. It included a lineup of the original recordings which spawned the band’s only album -- 2 People to 4 People to 3 People to 4 -- which, along with some homemade silkscreened t-shirts -- comprised our small offering to posterity.

Notes on the recordings:

Bittersweet, Home, Tea & Tobacco, Funk, Stuck on Sunday, First World Man, Tolkien and To Thurston written and recorded by the Treepeople in São Paulo, Brazil 1995-1996. Band members include Roy Kosuge, Stephen Baxter, Tony Vlasak, Daniel Shirai and Tohko Kosuge. You Say it Works, Steve’s Distortion and Sometimes Hard recorded by Daniel Shirai and Tony Vlasak in New York 2003-2004. Covers: All My Lovin written by the Beatles and Fade Away written by Oasis.

The tracks have since been remastered, digitized and compressed. The word ‘remaster’ may seem like a peculiar description to anyone who listens to these songs, since they still sound as rough as any demo made by high school amateur audio technicians in the 1990s. While some of the tracks like Tea & Tobacco, Stuck on Sunday and Tolkien, were recorded in a ‘studio,’ most of the others were done live, in one shot with rudimentary equipment. Shockingly, Bittersweet and Funk, two of our most energetic tracks, were recorded using a crappy handheld recorder placed on top of one of the amps in the Graded cafeteria during a rehearsal. Considering our paleolithic resources, the songs actually didn’t turn out as badly as they could have. As for the various erroneous guitar strokes, the numerous notes and yes, entire lines sung off key, and the wavering tempos on the drums -- well, I suppose those are the spices that give these raw bits of punk, funk, pop and rock their naive authenticity.

send an email to dshirai@gmail.com