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Chemtrail- Top Advant Garde Act

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Chemtrail- Top Advant Garde Act, originally uploaded by katatak.

Chemtrail was nominated in 4 categories for the 15th Annual Asbury Music Awards which were held at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park1 tonight. Although they didn’t win any of the individual awards, the band as a whole won Top Advant Garde Act! We decided the Advant Garde is where they put all the other bands that don’t really fit into any of the other 10 genres to which they awarded a ‘Top Act’ trophy. Whatever genre they are considered, this is a super-awesome pat on the back for them. The other awards for which they were considered were Top Drummer– Chris Lukens, Top Guitarist–Dan Ridenour, and (of course!) Top Bassist– J.Maggio. sweet.

One of the coolest things about the band’s honor tonight is that there was a ballot that anyone could fill out to vote… but we didn’t know about it. So this somewhat of a popularity contest wasn’t something that we sent out emails to all of our friends to vote for. I even had someone ask me about who did the voting- if there was somewhere online that she could go to give them a vote, but in all my searchings around, I’d not seen any links to this ballot (until now- found on Google). We did find out at some point after the ballots were due in (possibly even between Thursday and tonight), so at that point we couldn’t ask friends to vote. So that just makes it all the more cool that they won.

Congratulations, Guys!!

1. Asbury’s music scene is likely somewhere the size of a lake in the whole ‘big fish-small pond; little-fish big pond(i.e. ocean)’ kind of metaphor, so Chemtrail seems to be growing quickly in this lake. I suppose lakes come in many different sizes, too, so I shall try to quantify this. The announcer at the awards ceremony claims that Asbury is an internationally known music scene and I’d agree with that. Not known, necessarily to the average Joe, but to anyone who’s done his/her homework on the American music scenes (esp. independent music), Asbury is likely known. Even I, who had no real knowledge of music scenes had heard of this place in New Jersey where Bruce Spingsteen got his start: a place called The Stone Pony. That’s where the Music Awards were held.

A boy and his bass

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No, my friends, not about fish. The other bass. The musical one.

J’s gone and joined a band out here, which we both are pretty excited about. I know how much his music means to him and he was getting into such a great place there in Chicago before we high-tailed it out here. I guess the ‘T‘ in both of us told us to come to New Jersey and still tells us it was the right choice, while other parts of our personalities would love to see what would become of his continued work in music.
While this band, Chemtrail, is quite different from his past bands in style, it still has a wonderful (in my opinion) sound that.. well, it’s hard to describe, but for me, it makes my heart feel very light and warm… so there ya go. A rare ‘feeling’ moment you’ll hear out of me (see ‘T’ above for explanation). So far he’s just been to the tryout and initial practice, but has another practice tomorrow night and will be heading down on average a couple of times a week. Please visit Chemtrail’s MySpace page for a sampling of their music.

iTunes is currently playing Face Me by Chemtrail