Freighter - Biography
This band's profile is 'invisible', meaning that it's much less prominent on the site - either because it's incomplete, or maybe doesn't entirely fit MS format.
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2006-
Biography
Freighter is a technical progressive metal band from the San Francisco Bay Area. Founders and lifelong friends Travis Andrews (guitar / vocals) and Jason Braatz (bass) partner with drummer Matt Guggemos to form a power-trio that pulls from many varied disciplines and truly stands as a unique voice in modern metal.
After meeting as children (while their moms were at Jazzercise), the two grew up together in Sun Prairie, WI and were playing in each other's bands shortly after they could hold their guitars. While on tour in 2005, they started writing the songs that would become Freighter's self-titled first album released in 2008.
"...a metal machine that's ready to match pretty much any riff factory, beat for beat and note for note." -Isthmus
"...supremely rockin' stuff, whatever the hell it means." -The Daily Page
"A Madison trio that knows how to play with metal structures of the past while injecting a contemporary intensity to them." - Maximum Ink
Five years later, Jason and Travis reunited in San Francisco and began putting together Freighter's next act, which begins with the July 2019 release of their second album The Den.
On The Den, Freighter has created an album that's engaging for metalheads and non- metalheads alike. Brutal, complex riffs and powerful vocals weave inside drums that explode with color and life. By eschewing a click track and maintaining continuous unedited drum takes, The Den places a priority on the humanity of the material, giving the production a warmth and bounce that is immediately captivating to all sorts of listeners. Ever-shifting time signatures, metric modulations, and microtonality are juxtaposed with deep grooves and progressive harmonies to lend a sense of unpredictability and unreliability, owing to the album's thematic focus on the endless struggle with sleep - and the downstream effects of not getting enough of it.
"The Den is a reclusive (sometimes flamboyant), intuitive (not intellectual), folk art (not fine art). It was designed to be pure fantasy or fiction about sleep and misremembering. There is some OCD about organizing dreams, cataloguing human interactions, and exploring fantasy prone personalities. Essentially mental illness in music." -Travis
Travis Andrews is the co-founder and electric guitarist in The Living Earth Show, an iconoclastic San Francisco-based chamber ensemble. In that capacity, Andrews' performances have been praised as "mind-blowing" and "a vanguard effort of new chamber music" by the San Francisco Examiner and "emotional, transcendent, and at times bursting with raw post- rock power" by the Charleston City Paper. Highly in demand as a solo artist, Andrews has been a featured soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Eco Ensemble, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. A musical omnivore, Andrews also performs with Magik*Magik, nü-metal warriors C O /\/\ /\/\ /\ /\/ D O, and chambercore band miRthkon.
Jason Braatz lives in Oakland with his wife and two old dogs, and currently also plays bass with the Kevin Conness Band.
Matthew "Guggy" Guggemos is a Napa-based drummer, who has recorded three albums with miRthkon and currently leads his solo project "Drum Language." He is a speech-language pathologist, certified autism specialist, life-long martial arts student, skier, researcher, Mensa award winner, juggler, and dad.
[i]Bio from homepage
After meeting as children (while their moms were at Jazzercise), the two grew up together in Sun Prairie, WI and were playing in each other's bands shortly after they could hold their guitars. While on tour in 2005, they started writing the songs that would become Freighter's self-titled first album released in 2008.
"...a metal machine that's ready to match pretty much any riff factory, beat for beat and note for note." -Isthmus
"...supremely rockin' stuff, whatever the hell it means." -The Daily Page
"A Madison trio that knows how to play with metal structures of the past while injecting a contemporary intensity to them." - Maximum Ink
Five years later, Jason and Travis reunited in San Francisco and began putting together Freighter's next act, which begins with the July 2019 release of their second album The Den.
On The Den, Freighter has created an album that's engaging for metalheads and non- metalheads alike. Brutal, complex riffs and powerful vocals weave inside drums that explode with color and life. By eschewing a click track and maintaining continuous unedited drum takes, The Den places a priority on the humanity of the material, giving the production a warmth and bounce that is immediately captivating to all sorts of listeners. Ever-shifting time signatures, metric modulations, and microtonality are juxtaposed with deep grooves and progressive harmonies to lend a sense of unpredictability and unreliability, owing to the album's thematic focus on the endless struggle with sleep - and the downstream effects of not getting enough of it.
"The Den is a reclusive (sometimes flamboyant), intuitive (not intellectual), folk art (not fine art). It was designed to be pure fantasy or fiction about sleep and misremembering. There is some OCD about organizing dreams, cataloguing human interactions, and exploring fantasy prone personalities. Essentially mental illness in music." -Travis
Travis Andrews is the co-founder and electric guitarist in The Living Earth Show, an iconoclastic San Francisco-based chamber ensemble. In that capacity, Andrews' performances have been praised as "mind-blowing" and "a vanguard effort of new chamber music" by the San Francisco Examiner and "emotional, transcendent, and at times bursting with raw post- rock power" by the Charleston City Paper. Highly in demand as a solo artist, Andrews has been a featured soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Eco Ensemble, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. A musical omnivore, Andrews also performs with Magik*Magik, nü-metal warriors C O /\/\ /\/\ /\ /\/ D O, and chambercore band miRthkon.
Jason Braatz lives in Oakland with his wife and two old dogs, and currently also plays bass with the Kevin Conness Band.
Matthew "Guggy" Guggemos is a Napa-based drummer, who has recorded three albums with miRthkon and currently leads his solo project "Drum Language." He is a speech-language pathologist, certified autism specialist, life-long martial arts student, skier, researcher, Mensa award winner, juggler, and dad.
[i]Bio from homepage