This Saturday, beacons of responsibility Missing People play
their fourth show in two and a half years at Radio-Active Records' new location with Pocket of Lollipops. Their last show was at
Sweat Records just a week ago and the band is finally showing some
signs of momentum.
I played with 2/3 of them in '96 as :nobuhjest: (disclaimer!). While their
new act has a lot of similarities and shares phonetic titular traits
with the '80s band Missing Persons, this trio's approach is more akin to
the winding, layered, auditory gymnastics of Tortoise, Aerial M or Don
Caballero rather than Garden Variety or Jawbreaker, but they are still
musical products of the '90s.
Shortly after :nobuhjest: disbanded, guitarist and lead vocalist Dave Samayoa met drummer Alex Luna at a Denny's. They briefly formed Motion Picture Negative. Meanwhile, their eventual third member Sean Perscky was playing drums for Secret Service (another disclaimer) and eventually joined Hialeah goth-poppers Modernage and their heavy schedule of travel and shows.
"I'd been playing drums for so long, it kind of got boring," Perscky admits. "I even took lessons for pretty much a full year to get interested in it again... reteach myself and also learn some new things, but it didn't really work out, but i was also playing bass during this time...with what would become Missing People. "
Once Missing People officially formed, Samayoa and Perscky were making slow and steady progress, recording and piecing together parts before Luna came on board. "When I came in, we had these ten-minute-long epics that we had to trim down," Luna remembers. "Every song had about seven different parts. It was slow in the beginning, cause we would go on long hiatuses where we would go two months between practices but now we're playing a lot more frequently."
Having stepped out of the music scene for a while, the band is basically starting from scratch. "We haven't really made any connections with any other bands right now cause we haven't played out that much," Perscky says about their recent shows.
Keeping it all in perspective, the band expects to record on their own but keep touring to a minimum," If we can make a weekend out of it or something, that would make sense cause i'm frequently on call." says Luna, who's also a doctor of internal medicine. "This isn't some fantasy that we have of making some band that will make it big, so we're going at our own pace and doing it how we wanna do it. "
Missing People. With Pocket of Lollipops. 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 12 at Radio-Active Records, 845 N. Federal Highway, Fort Lauderdale. No Cover. Call 954-762-9488.
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