Strata

I first came across Strata following a conversation I had with CONFRONT’s Editor earlier this year. I had never heard of the band before and was a complete stranger to their music. After Angel told me how different their sound was and how the lyrics had grabbed her attention immediately, I decided to check them out. I soon discovered for myself that this pop-rock/alternative band had a lot more in store than I could have imagined.

Since coming together in 2001, this San Francisco quartet has released two EPs and one self titled full length album. They are now on the verge of releasing their sophmore effort, titled ‘Strata Presents The End Of The World’ a few tracks of which can be heard on the band’s MySpace page.

I began listening to some of the latest material and was hooked instantly. These are not regular tunes with everyday lyrics, the likes of which you placidly mumble along to in the car. There are messages and deeper meanings to be discovered when you take the time to listen; love, pure and unadulterated seen through clear lenses rather than rose coloured glasses, being the overall theme.

This interview meant a great deal to CONFRONT Magazine as we all feel very attached to this band in one way or another and love their work, their words and their music.

CONFRONT: You just started touring across Canada with Finger Eleven, how is that experience going so far?

ERIC: It’s been really good! They’re old friends of ours so…

CONFRONT: Really?

ERIC: We did Snowcore together in 2005 I think…And that was three and a half or four months or something, it was really long and then we toured with them again after that so we spent a lot of time on each other’s buses.

CONFRONT: Cool.

ERIC: They’re a very cool group of people.

CONFRONT: So, having fun so far?

ERIC: Yeah! I mean, the first few shows in Quebec are a little…Because of the language barrier, probably a little strange but, I’m looking forward to the Toronto show especially.

CONFRONT: Yes, Ontario should be good! Your third album, ‘Strata Presents the End of the World’ will be released on July 17th. What should we be expecting from your latest achievement?

ERIC: I think if you’ve heard the last record then you would probably be…I think this one’s going to be kind of a polarizing thing with our existing fan base, it’s going to draw a line in the sand between the people who are willing to grow with us and the people who wanted us to do the same thing over and over again.

CONFRONT: Great! Who or what were your major influences in the process of writing the album, musically or non-musically?

ERIC: Lyrically – I mean I can’t really speak for the rest of the guys because everybody listens to their own things – I just paid a lot of attention to lyrics and folk music, with a lot of Bob Dylan and Bright Eyes and Death Cab and just any artist that uses their three and a half minutes per song to kind of tell a story and go somewhere with it and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

CONFRONT: Your first single “Cocaine”, speaks of how one single experience can change your life forever. So, do you believe that in this world right now people just don’t think about actions and their consequences?

ERIC: I think that, yeah! I think that there’s definitely, as far as like following and obeying laws, people are definitely afraid of authority still and maybe that’s good but, as far as moral consequences, I think you’re right. I think that people definitely lack those and they’re being desensitized every day. Look at pop culture right now. I went to the movies and I had all this time to kill and I was like: “I’m just going to go to a movie by myself”. I walk up and I look to see what’s playing and everything is torture. They’re all movies based on people torturing each other, it’s a really weird social fad I guess…

CONFRONT: And they attract a lot of people too…

ERIC: It’s just disgusting. I mean, I think you should be able to watch whatever you want but I do think that there’s something wrong when we find that entertaining.

CONFRONT: Yeah, appealing…

ERIC: And it’s just something you’re not meant to see. I remember when, like seven years ago, I was online and seeing a movie of a kid getting hit by a train… And the way his body just exploded and everybody around me who was watching the clip just kept watching it over and over again and they were laughing at it and I was just like… I’m still disgusted by that and I still see it and I don’t understand how people can want to see all that and my point is I think that’s fucking everybody’s heads up. Like, the easy access to such horrible shit is really ruining our minds.

CONFRONT: Definitely. ‘The End of the World’ kind of sounds a bit gloomy to some people as a title but, do you think there is still hope for us in the world or what are your personal hopes?

ERIC: I think it’s the end of the world as we know it, you know? Things are changing and everything is changing. Every industry you can think of is changing drastically. The way people interact with each other is changing. Like us in the United States, I think we’re all really suspect of each other all the time and patriotism is called into question all the time and we’re all afraid of each other. Everything’s fucked up. It’s sad because as long as your internet connection is fast and you have Pepsi in the fridge, then who cares about anything else and that attitude to me, is the end of the world, once we stop caring. So yeah, maybe it seems a little gloomy but it’s the truth.

CONFRONT: But in some songs on the album, there’s positivity and…

ERIC: There’s hope! There’s definitely hope because if you don’t have love and you don’t have hope and you don’t have all these positive things, then what’s the point of even recording music, you know? Of course it’s not going to all be gloomy. If I were that depressed, I…

CONFRONT: You wouldn’t be here (laughing)

ERIC: (laughing) I wouldn’t be alive, let alone trying to work so hard to make a great record, you know?

CONFRONT: I saw your performance last night in Sherbrooke and you apologized for your country.

ERIC: Yeah…

CONFRONT: What do you feel most sorry for?

ERIC: I’m just kind of ashamed of how bull-headed I think our country has become. And I was thinking about it last night. Thinking, how acceptable it is for us in America to talk badly about other countries. For some reason I was thinking about, if someone had said: “Oh I hate Canada or I hate Germany or I hate this other country”. You’d hear that in America and people would be like: “Yeah fuck them” or whatever. But we have this attitude in the United States that we are number one; the greatest country in the world. We’re free and all this stuff and like, these people are so uninformed. There’s no value placed on learning a second language, thus there’s no value placed on learning about culture at all. Of course you’re going to think that you’re the best country in the world if you have nothing to base that on, you have no frame of reference. And I’m ashamed of us trying to push that on to people. If that’s how our country is going to be then cool but, just like with religion, you shouldn’t push that on other people, you shouldn’t push any of your beliefs on other people. And I feel like in our country, our official religion isn’t Christianity, it’s consumerism and we’re pushing that on the entire world and forcing everybody to live like us. And I’ve been reading a lot of books about American Imperialism and things like that and I can see where we’re going and what the world is going to look like in twenty years… And I’m apologizing in advance for that.

CONFRONT: No offence taken, it’s not your fault!

ERIC: (laughing) It’s just like, what’s hypocritical of me is, I’ll still go to Wal-Mart when the bus stops because like…

CONFRONT: Yeah we all do…

ERIC: But it’s so fucked. It’s like there’s no other way to get the things that you need. Unless you want to devote your entire life to making a change, I mean, you can’t change anything and that’s the hopeless feeling of you know [like] we’re on a rollercoaster and it’s going down and you can’t stop it.

CONFRONT: You had to go through tough times and feelings and emotions while writing your album…

ERIC: Yeah…

CONFRONT: Once it was all done and recorded and everything, what did you feel? like a relief or?

ERIC: Well we recorded it in England and I was away from my wife and my everything that I care about. And we usually don’t go more than a month without seeing each other and this was three months and that’s where a lot of the sadness came from; being so isolated and separated and everything and then, when we got home, we listened to the record and kind of felt like it wasn’t done. Like it wasn’t what we worked so hard to achieve. Just wasn’t there. So we just scrapped most of it and started again. And so we wrote this album probably three times and just kept cutting things. Like, if in one song something had already been said or that sentiment had already been expressed in another song then what’s the point of having it? So we’d cut it and do a different one and try to make sure that, from the beginning to the end, it was always taking you somewhere else. And unfortunately for a lot of people, that’s not what they want. They want an album that they can put on and it can be background music that doesn’t distract them for forty-five minutes while they dance or do whatever. And this begs you to pay attention to it; as each song goes from one to the other, they sound like different bands and I think that that’s accurately depicting our emotions and they’re all different from each other.

CONFRONT: Great. I read the lyrics to “Love of Life”. What is your vision of love today? Where do you think people can still find love in the cruel world?

ERIC: I think they can find it in honesty. You know like, MySpace and social networking sites and all that kind of stuff have become so much a part of our personality and meeting each other online and whatever, that’s become a pretty commonplace thing. And I think what people forget is that it’s like Dungeons and Dragons; It’s role playing. It’s like when you have your MySpace profile, that’s your superhero, that’s the ultimate you, and that’s not really who you are necessarily. And if you take two people who look like they’re made for each other in the online world and you actually cut their electricity, who are they really? Do they match? I mean, you can find that real kind of love if you’re able to…

CONFRONT: Disconnect from it kind of…

ERIC: Yeah, if you can go hiking in the wilderness and still talk to each other constantly like you’re best friends after years and years then, you know…

CONFRONT: That’s intriguing, we should start that!

ERIC: Well that’s what my wife and I do back home. We leave the cell phones at home and we go to the mountains in Santa Cruz and we just walk around and look at stuff and we’re talking from the second we leave until the second we go to sleep and that’s what friendship is.

CONFRONT: So it’s mostly about friendship for you?

ERIC: Yeah! Your best friend, with who you happen to enjoy having sex with; that’s the perfect relationship. (laughing)

CONFRONT: Exactly. You wrote the book Coma Therapy, released in January; sort of a life retrospective, experience and critique of the world.

ERIC: (laughing) Is it?

CONFRONT: Well it felt like it! Well I didn’t read all of it. I read critiques and all. So how did your band mates react to it when it came out?

ERIC: They were a little bit hurt I think at first because I didn’t tell them I was writing a book.

CONFRONT: Oh really?

ERIC: I had become kind of elusive because they were at the studio every day and trying to find new sounds and wondering where I was. And I was dealing with wondering if I wanted to still be in a rock band or if I wanted to just get a job. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and my mom was dying, well she didn’t die, but she had cancer. They were just kind of like: “Ok well we don’t even know if Eric’s ever coming back to practice and he wont answer his phone”. And all of a sudden I’m like: “Hey, I wrote a book!” And they’re like: “Well where the fuck were you? We’re trying to write an album, like what were you doing?” And I never apologized for it because it never felt like I should, you know? It’s something that I needed to do.

CONFRONT: So are they more understanding now?

ERIC: Yeah! And I think that if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t know the value of the story and know that my purpose in life is to tell stories; like whether it’s through music or in print.

CONFRONT: So it helped you with writing the album after that?

ERIC: Yeah! I mean it prompted the scrapping of almost all the lyrics that I had written up to that point because I didn’t feel like they were cohesive enough to put out there.

CONFRONT: You were talking about MySpace before. That was part of one of my questions. CONFRONT Magazine is a web-based publication based on the fact that more and more people rely on the internet. How do you think it has affected the music industry?

ERIC: I think it’s given the power back to the artists again. Or not back, I don’t think we ever had the power that we have now. And, in a lot of band’s cases, certainly not ours, but a lot of bands, they just began to get dropped. It would be great if they got dropped from their record deals because they would be able to put out new music. The old world’s system is so slow. It’s based on quarterly schedules and corporations and [artists] will write a song and maybe people won’t hear it for six months or a year. And what the internet has started to do is that you can start a band, you can have music up on your MySpace within a week and you can have fans within 10 minutes of that. Like, literally it can happen that fast. It’s something that scares the crap out of not just record labels, but publicists. That’s like when I was saying: “everything is changing”. Everything is. You have no clue what the next five years are going to be like and I think that’s really exciting; to be alive right now and to be involved with this, you know? It’ll be like surviving the crash of 29. To know how tough things can get.

CONFRONT: What should Strata fans or future fans expect from you guys in the near future?

ERIC: We’re going to continue to be honest with ourselves and our music. We’ve always had that kind of pledge to our crowd that we’re not going to lie to them. That sometimes means that we’re not going to play old songs. And that’s all me. If they want to be mad about that they can direct their anger at me because, I’m speaking English in those, I’m saying words in those songs and if I’m just saying words and they don’t matter then… Like what, you know? I want them to still matter and sometimes I’m not feeling that way. I hated my life; I hated myself when I wrote the lyrics of the last record so, a lot of times I can’t find myself, I can’t find it in myself to sing those songs. They should just expect more honesty and more heart I guess.

CONFRONT: CONFRONT Magazine’s main objective is to redefine mainstream. To us it’s just the ability to reach a lot of people. What’s your definition of mainstream today?

ERIC: That’s exactly it. I defend mainstream music all the time because I don’t think that, by definition, it sucks. I just think that a lot of it is really shitty. It’s not shitty because a lot of people like it. If that were the case, then that means The Beatles were horrible.

CONFRONT: Yeah, well no!

(Both laughing)

ERIC: Like mainstream, all that means it’s just the same as pop. I consider, I want, our band to be a pop band. I want a lot of people to like us!

CONFRONT: Sure!

ERIC: I think you’re dead on with your definition.

CONFRONT: Thanks! First and last CD purchased?

ERIC: First ever?

CONFRONT: Well CD or record or…

ERIC: Well I never bought a record. Well, I buy vinyl now but… The first record I ever owned was The Beatles, “Rubber Soul”. And the last thing I bought was the new Modest Mouse record I think.

CONFRONT: Is it good?

ERIC: It’s so good! Oh my God it’s amazing.

CONFRONT: First and last concert?

ERIC: First big show I ever went to was Oasis, with an unknown band called Third Eye Blind opening.

CONFRONT: Unknown? (laughing)

ERIC: No, seriously…

CONFRONT: Yeah, they were unknown at the time.

ERIC: No one knew who they were, but Oasis had just started getting really big in the States.

CONFRONT: And the last one?

ERIC: The last one I went to… All I can think of is ours! The last one I went to that just reaffirmed my faith in music was TV On The Radio. That band is just incredible. It was actually a radio show so I saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and I saw TV On The Radio and I can’t remember who else was there, it was just so great.

CONFRONT: We have a section called Daily Urges which gives our correspondents and readers the opportunity to share their musical favourites. So what are your current Daily Urges?

ERIC: The new Bright Eyes album… There’s just so much in music right now… The new Nine Inch Nails record is great. Sonny Moore who used to be the singer of From First To Last, he’s got a solo thing going. And he doesn’t have any music out other than MySpace but, I go to it every day to listen to the songs that he has on there, because he’s going to be the new Björk I think.

CONFRONT: Sweet, because I love Björk!

ERIC: Oh he’s incredible!

CONFRONT: If you could choose one thing you would like the public to remember from Strata?

ERIC: Ummm…

CONFRONT: It’s a hard one isn’t it? (laughing)

ERIC: (laughing) Yeah! I think just finding the message in our music which is to find your own faith in yourself or whatever it might be in. Like, make yourself God or something. Just to live like your life is important, because… it has to be.

CONFRONT: Great!

ERIC: Sorry if I’m coming off like…

CONFRONT: No it’s great!

ERIC: Pessimist or something, I’m in a weird mood… (laughing)

CONFRONT: (laughing) Thank you very much Eric!

ERIC: Yeah! No problem!

Eric continued apologizing as I packed away my things and stood to leave. I laughed and told him it didn’t matter at all. Much like he had to say himself, all we want is for people to be honest and that’s what he gave me: honesty and straight forward answers. No matter what the mood, these types of conversations are always more interesting than the typical answers we hear when people obviously just want to get it over with. After grabbing his Ipod from his bunk and asking me where he could find good shopping – explaining to me that he felt like walking in the rain with his music to clear his mind – I directed him as best I could before we parted ways.

The concert was awesome as predicted and Strata gave a brilliant performance. I am really looking forward to the album release on July 17th, 2007 and strongly suggest it to everyone because as Eric said, it has stories to tell and it’s begging you to listen to it. I assure you, you won’t regret it!

To view all the pictures taken that night, please visit our library of content and click on any one of the image gallery links.

Official Website: http://www.stratadirect.com
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/strata

Editor’s note: In addition to being lead vocalist for the bands Strata and The Limousines, Eric Victorino is also the author of Coma Therapy, a collection of poetry written prior to the recording of Strata’s upcoming album. Please take the time to check it out.

Eric’s MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/ericvictorino
Coma Therapy MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/comatherapyericvictorino