The story of Beat Symphony

Beat Symphony was a band existing in the joing of the last millenium with the current, in the middle of the y2k history and the "everything on teh internet is teh possible!"

It consisted of myself, Zap, and a bloke from the big Apple - New York City: Michael W. Gilboe, aka "Xavier Money".

We made music online together, in the heat of the mp3.com boom. We both liked old synth music and classical harmonies so we dreamt up the band "Beat Symphony" which was "100 years retro".. synthpop and dance beats with a classical baroque touch, i.e. Steam-punk dance music. It all went okay and we had some fun. We made a ton of music together, yet we had never met in real life!.

So one day we decided to actually meet. He flew over here, I managed to get us on TV (Swedish TV4 "nyhetsmorgon", a morning couch TV show) and we even got to play "live"(ish, I had recorded backings) on TV on prime-morning time. We were supposed to play two tracks, but then a little old lady won 5 million SEK on one of those "scrape yellow goo of some numbers" televiset lottery segment and the shows priorities changed, and whoosh, our second song was thrown out. Sigh.

We also recorded a music video in a really cool factory museum in town, complete in victorian garb and steam engines pumping, very cool. What wasn't so fun was that we both got sick the day before (some collission between US and Swedish germs created the stomach-flu from heck) and that's why I look as if I am going to throw up both in the promo pics we shot there as well as the video (which I no longer have a copy of, eek!).

Long story short, about the same time this happened I had started to do music featuring my wife which was three orders of magnitude more successful than what I did with "Beat Symphony". Due to lack of time, the Beat Symphony project kinda ground to a halt, and me and Gilboe sorta lost touch.

I remember worrying about him on 9/11 but he was on mid Manhattan and wasn't really affected. Since then we have basically parted ways for no particular reason other than life taking us elsewhere, and me really not having much time for music anywa, being now in a more visual industry, and having a bit of "been there, done that" feeling with the enormous sucess (well, at least "online" speaking) of my wifes music. Gilboe apparently still is into music and I just found out he is nowdays known in the NY music circuit as "DJ Copperhead" (and boy is the "copperhead" appropriate... LOL) and he seems to be hanging around www.copperheadz.com... I think.

It was a fun time, but life has moved on. I'm still proud of the work we did, even though we didn't always agree on what needed to be done. Also it was an unfortunate time where super-pitch-correct singing was en vogue, and as much as Michael was a great wringer of words and arranger of vocal melodies, his pitch accuracy wasn't always dead on. It's funny, though, that the trend has shifted such that what I at the time cringed at as "off key" vocals now (due to the overuse of the "cher" effect, I imagine) come off as quite nice, although, yeah, the songs still contain a sour note or three, and at the time I didn't have the technology to un-sour it. They are still damned fine tracks, and I'll probably put up more of them online again at some later date.

Thanks for reading "le story la Beat Symphonie" ;)

- Håkan "Zap" Andersson

Steam Hover Ship Machinist

P.S. Michael used to have IndulteU.com as a label site for Beat Symphony. Some of the old flash files on this page (for which I lost the source) still points to that site. For a while that site was taken over by a porn site, but as of this typing (2005-12-09), it seems to not exist at all. D.S.