Dead Sea Surfers

The Dead Sea Surfers, the ghoulish synthpop band where industrial goth meets rock n roll. The band got its start when Dead Sea Surfers’ mastermind Aleister  Hobbs “had been playing around with a few songs that [he] had written.”

In his own words… “Words and music for what seems like years but naturally when you run into some like minded souls the art becomes a collaboration and a little bit of give and take. But being a solo artist for so long, along with doing the vocals, certainly puts you in the driver’s seat when deciding arrangements and such. It seemed like every band I had played for every other person was a mute so it then became a platform for whatever I wanted to say.”

Curious of how the name Dead Sea Surfers came to be? The birth of the Dead Sea Surfers is a rather unusual one, Aleister shared the story with me. “At the time the band I was playing with was doing a mixture of material from 60s Surf Standards to “Rockability” to original punk and goth style music. To basic rock ( I think we were using the Sylvesters or Distant Suns as the name at that time) Anyway we were meshing styles together just sorta felt right, I had grown up in NY so playing all the clubs downtown including CBGB’s R.I.P. during the 1980s is a given. Anyway we had a fan named Stan and he just blurted out the name the “Dead Sea Surfers” and it stuck with me and I figured no matter how many personal changes I would make that since I was still writing the music and keyboard melodies and singing that the sound would grow rather than sound different. I figured once I started to establish the name the worst thing I could do would be to change the name. I have always had the rights to the dot com name www.deadseasurfers.com”

Inspiration for DSS surprisingly comes from “Very positive people, people who tend to see things with a twisted side and the music and vocals speak to both elements. We have a really organized environment filled with other musicians like my friend who played keys on the debut Dead Sea Surfers album, Ian Briscoe who is like a wiz kid to me. He’s into electronics and repairing old synths and he plays around with a Roland MC 808 and he got me into buying a Roland MC 909 because he likes to build sounds from scratch or samples. And, Mikey Stephenson who played drums on 90 % of the songs on the debut cd had samples of all his drum pieces which works out great for me to build up a demo around the house as I now have my second bedroom setup as a studio.”

Not only do people inspire Hobbs but also his dreams. “I had a bunch of songs inspired by morphine dreams that I had while in a 3 month drug induced coma in 1999. I am sure the at least one of the dreams was dream from the Manson family cave.”

As a horror blog the always classic, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” question is a must. And the favorite film of the band is …Dawn of the Dead. According to Hobbs, “there is nothing quite like the black and white version, it’s so ghoulish. A newer film would probably have to include Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, pretty intense. Another favorite of [Aleister’s] would be 30 Days of Night the original even though the confusion between zombie and vampires is blurred.”

Continuing the horror theme, if the Dead Sea Surfers were a monster band they would be zombies. “A bunch a zombies seems the easiest route to go and probably the most fun, seems like you could do the most theatrical live sets dressed ghoulish.” And, if the Dead Sea Surfers could play with any dead or in this case and zombiefied legend, it would have to be Misfit or Johnny, Joey and Dee Dee of the Ramones and the legend Jim Morrison.”

The Dead Sea Surfers’ goals for 2011 are simple: to record more music and get a few more compilations. As well as having Hobbs’ getting the operation, he needs to rid him of the cancer that is in his tongue and neck.

For more information check out these sites:

http://www.reverbnation.com/deadseasurfers (which is the first of their sites to be updated)
http://cdbaby.com/cd/deadseasurfers
http://www.deadseasurfers.com
http://www.myspace.com/deadseasurfers
http://twitter.com/Aleistercat
http://www.last.fm/music/Dead+Sea+Surfers
http://www.youtube.com/user/DeadSeaSurfers
http://vampirefreaks.com/DeadSeaSurfers