Stockhausen and The Amplified Riot - a beginning

The Amplified Riot started off in January 2020 as a three-piece garage / krautrock band.  Just your basic guitar, drums, bass thing with an occasional synth thrown in for weirdness.  In those first few months, we had crafted seven songs and working on fine tuning those songs for gigs and a release of some sort later in the year.

Then the 2020 pandemic happened and things slowly down to a grinding halt.  However, that didn’t stop me from working on new ideas and recording demos at home.  As time passed and the future of civilization looked like it was unraveling each day, I kept working on music (and riding my bike a lot) with the anticipation of getting back with the band mates as soon as we could.

But the months dragged on.

Finally, when we could finally meet and start jamming again, it appeared that EVERYONE had the same idea.  And each of us got busy with other, more established bands.  But I still liked the songs we made together and wanted to test out the idea of playing them on my own.  Hip hop, rap, trill, electronic artists all use drum machines and backing tracks without remorse and it’s commonly accepted to do so in those genres… why not with rock?

I still liked the name too, but I wanted to extend it out to make it almost ridiculous for a one-person band to have a long band name.  Eventually, I decided on Stockhausen and The Amplified Riot - as a way to pay homage to the band's beginning as well as call out to one of the most influential modern composers.   

From there, I began to rearrange the music to accommodate just me and a drum machine and started testing out the music at small gigs around Houston.  The results were interesting and encouraging so I kept it going with building touring schedules and (eventually) booking studio time.  

Every once in a while, I consider adding a bass player to play gigs with me since I feel the live sound could certainly use some low end frequencies.  I suppose we shall see what happens, but for now – it’s just me on the guitar and my trusty drum machine.

TLDR: all about the start of the band.