It all began in 9th or 10th grade. Ben and Mike (me) met two or three times at Ben's place plugging a budget microphone into the HiFi and started to produce noise with a guitar and me screaming things into the mic. Back then we weren't that productive but we definitely were totally motivated in doing something with music. It should be loud fast and powerful. We still looked for somebody to play the drums. Actually I was interested in playing them but back then I kind of didn't have the motivation. There was still one guy called Marius Asenkerschbaumer who also was interested in forming a band. And there we were Marius A. on the drums, Benjamin K. on the guitar and me (Mike) "singing". We didn't care for a bassist and had no musical use for it.

At the beginning we always met at Ben's place with a budget mic connected to a HiFi an electrical guitar and a snare with all sorts of things like plastic baskets standing and hanging around it creating a "very - beginners" drumset. That's when our first band Adrenaline was formed. After some time Marius got himself a real drumset and we also

Marius A. on his drumset

managed to organise ourselves a sweet little practice room at the German School, sponsored by our former headmaster Schumann - thank you very much !! This room stayed ours since then and we always were productive in there. It was a room like no other.

Time went by and we created our first punky songs like "School sucks", "Commit Suicide" and "Christmas". As it is the tradition at the German School people come and go and Marius unfortunately had to leave for Germany after one year of playing with us. Now we were back at the old set up. - No drums -
But that was no problem. As I was always interested in playing them I picked up this wonderful habit. At the beginning of the next school year another guitarist/vocalist called Massimo Kubon and Bianca Szekely the bassist joined our lonesome duo.
It was new hope and with new hope comes a new beginning. At first we actually changed our band name from Adrenaline to Sycamore. Then we began to concentrate on the music. At first we thought about plaaying our old songs, but we soon figuered out that this idea was useless. So we decided to cover a popular tune of the "band" called FireWaterBurn. Next to this we even did an instrumental tune, which was our first "korn" like song ever; we called it “Damned”. We were so stoked by those achievements that we even had our first performance. It was located at the Red Baron. The birthday party of Ben K.'s father at which we performed two songs (Damned and FireWaterBurn).
Sycamore was motivated to do more. Massimo Kubon had this idea one time to do a performance with a good friend of his called Hausmeister Wagner (Tom our vocalist). The idea was great and at this time we even had a repertoire of more than two songs.
Save the dream, Damned and Trauma was all we had. Trauma never ever really got finished but with Save the Dream we were up and coming.
At the performance, which was around the end of the year 1999 with Massimo K. and Hausmeister Wagner making noises, Mike was missing on the drums as he had to fly to Austria, because of a sudden death by his aunt. No problem for the rest of the band; they just asked the drummer of Canuba (our idols back then) to jump in and improvise.

Drummer of Canuba - Terrance

Sycamore was getting around. Canuba aswell was a half "german-school-band" and in that year of 1999 they performed at the Peace Concert '99. We were amazed.

Yes we were. Our big dream was to perform at such a big event too. Well we were still far from it, but our enthusiasm had no boundaries, we were absolutely sure that we could make it as well right up to the big stages.
Well we were to face another stepback in terms of becoming a better band, when our singer Massimo had to leave for Germany as well. Sad but true, that’s reality and we made the best out of it.
Our urge to make music pushed us forward and told us not to give up (oh yeah that sounds really exaggerated,but how else can one express true feelings but to use this rhetorical devise).


Back to the band!
So after Massimo had left we simply hooked up with Tom, who we hardly knew back then. With him, we, as a band really improved and slowly but surely somehow found our band identity.
We started to write new songs, and as we all got better on our instruments, these songs were musically more interesting and exciting than the former ones.
But actually our creativity really started to rise to unknown dimensions, when our classteacher gave us a copy of the official invitation to the peace concert 2000, or at least an invitation to the audition for the peace concert.
Anyways, we were absolutely sure to make it , as I said before, to the big stage. So we rehearsed and rehearsed without ever thinking to stop and when the big day, a sunny saturday morning, came we were prepared and loaded with 2 brand new songs, which we were to perform at the audition.
And 4 days later, Bianca our lovely bassist called Ben, while he was enjoying a hot bath doing ....stuff, and told him that we, the small german school band Sycamore made it to the big stage.
Everybody was totally amazed and seriously couldn't believe it. Bianca also was in the same state of mind, and Tom...sure! All of them except for me. Why, you would ask now, why didn't I know about this news? Well, the answer is simple. I didn't know yet, I was on vacation somewhere around asia. A few days later when I came back, the rest of the band told me the good news. At first I freaked, then I thought they’re playing a trick on me and after that I just went for it.

Mike and Ben working hard

Back to business.
The following weeks were packed up with hours of practicing and reinforcing our musical skills. Still it was fun, because we all knew how our hard work would be granted.
A week before the big day, better say night, a meeting with the organizers of the event was scheduled to inform the bands about the whole thing. e.g how to behave on stage, how to perform, what not to do and so on...
When we were asked to write down the songs we would play, we could only mention three.
Three! Three songs to fill half an hour. Not really?
What to do? We went back to school and started writing new songs, determined to tear down a great show the following saturday. In the end we had enough songs to mesmerize the crowd.
Including our old favorite (which we now hate to play) "save the dream" the set list included "revolution in my had", "lifestyle", "feel it"(a freaking pop song with emo punk flair), and "revive".
I myself sitting behind the drums even had the guts to rip off a fantastic, for my abillities back then, drumsolo.
We all had fun because we saw the crowd go crazy and together with the wild stage light effects in the back it didn't really matter that my guitar was totally out of tune and sounded like s**t.
When we finished our set and climbed down the stage to become a part of the audience again, we were stoked and stoked again. Many people came up to us and told us about how powerful this performance was. It was a night to remember.
Although Tom’s mum said that he couldn't sing, because he was just screaming, we still were totally motivated and up for new challenges.
In the following months we played a few gigs on several occasions. Half a year later we watched the video with us playing at the peace concert and we were shocked. It sounded terrible.
But this was proof enough that we got better since then.
Soon after we played another gig at Ymca. we thought we totally screwed up but A month later a friend called and arranged that we could meet someone who could record our songs.
Therefore we sent him a demotape, with four budget produced songs on it and a month later we sat down at SAE studios to hopefully record our songs. Well one song was enough for that evening. It took us seven hours to do just one song. The problem was that we didn’t expect to record each instrument seperately and therefore some problems occurred. In the end the producer gave us a roughly mixed version of "Write to me" and told us to do the remainig 10 songs after the upcoming summer holidays. When we came back we never heard of him again, nor of our mastered version. It was a total rip off!
So our hope to make a whole album of Sycamore went down the loo.
Anyways, only the strong will survive! And in fall 2001 we rocked the peace concert again, and this time we all can proudly say we really did do a great job up there. It shouldn't sound like we are praising ourselves but this gig was really amazing. With intensive guitar solos, hard hitting bass lines, another extensive drumsolo and a raging voice we had powerful songs and hardly made mistakes; what could be explained through us having really grown as a band in the last year. We just hit that place big time!

But first one has to mention that before the second peace concert, tensions within the band were growing and it often came to loud discussions and so on…. We told ourselves that we would maybe break up after the gig at the american school. Maybe that’s because we played so well, we wanted one last great experience.
Unfortunately we knew that this was our last big thing as a band, in this lineup, because Tom was steadily moving closer towards his graduation. Needless to say we realized that we had to put our history, our achieved goals on cd, maybe also for others but more for ourselves.

Sycamore in its old days

A band is like a family, therefore the tensions disappeared soon after the great gig and we started to jam again, one thing in mind: “A Sycamore album”.
I was desperately searching around and just by chance a little flyer at RastaFari drew my attention to a tempting offer to record your muic professionally. I then came up with the news that I found someone who could be able to record us for 150 bucks a night. That was rather cheap, compared to some other studios in town, where they try to rip you off with prices up to 100 bucks per hour.
So we gave it a shot and spent 5 nights at, again SAE studios, and with the great advice of some cool people there we recorded ten tracks. It took a while and is not even finished yet in terms of mastering and making it sound like real audio, but we don't wanna rush anything. Tom is gone by now, Ben and I will face graduation soon and Bianca, she will stay another year but as long as we get our audio cd, before the last one of us has left Singapore it’s okay.

Maybe in the future we will do some more noise, in a different lineup of course but until then enjoy, along with us, our first semi-professional recording.