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Sunday, September 28, 2008

Space Theme is More-Than-Fitting for Walter Meego

Justin Sconza of Walter Meego pays little attention to the crowd during a performance at The Echo.

Electronic-pop duo, Justin Sconza (vocals) and Colin Yarck (synthesizers/beats), known by their “alter-ego” Walter Meego, performed Thursday at The Echo in Los Angeles, California. This venue the local Los Angeles hipster crowd, which the band has been getting used to since they packed up their Chicago lives and headed west nine months ago.

The trendy Silverlake and Echo Park areas of Los Angeles are finding very comfortable new tenants in the Walter Meego members.

The band performed along with a third member, Andrew Bernhardt, who is also living with them in the Los Angeles area right now. Bernhardt is increasingly moving towards becoming a permanent member of the band, but, according to Walter Meego, is not officially part of it yet because he was not there when the band formed.

As for which city the guys like better of Chicago and Los Angeles, neither one of them could decide, citing that they were just two different places.

Likewise, Sconza said that performing live and recording in a studio are “two different things,” and that he did not prefer one to the other. Performing live gives you more “freedom”, if you define freedom as “the right to make mistakes.”

In both mediums, Walter Meego takes the liberty of playing around with various electronic sounds and distortions, which, in this case, kept them occupied during the performance.
The band played straight through without stopping to talk to the audience, and barely took a breath before the last note of the last song before packing up their gear and heading offstage.

Perhaps the strict music-only policy the band members seemed to have on stage is a result of the transition into "Walter Meego," an alias that Sconza said "exists only in our minds."

It makes sense, considering Sconza did act and sound like two different people when he was on and off stage.

The light display during the performance was severely lacking for the psychedelic tone of Walter Meego’s act. Sconza and Yarck said they would love to have a better light show, but their restricted resources make it difficult to pull off right now.

We’re “limited in the sense of our staff,” Sconza said.

The Walter Meego official website (http://www.waltermeego.com) is as trippy as the music the band plays. You need to navigate space and the constellations in order to navigate the site. Sconza said he and Yarck made up the idea for the site, which goes along with the theme of Walter Meego’s recently released album Voyager. Sconza said he is intrigued by space because it is “the final frontier.”

It certainly seems like an appropriate theme for a band that somehow manages to blend live guitar, falsetto vocals and synthesizers into something that just makes you want to dance.

Check out a clip of the live performance!

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