Artist description Very Ambient and a lot of emotion with hints of rock. The vocals and melodies are very strong, blending in with the emotion of the music.The sound draws you in and the melody stays with you.

Music Style Ambient/Rock

Musical Influences Radiohead/U2/Pedro the Lion/The Violet Burning/The Doors

Similar Artists Radiohead/The Verve/Jeff Buckley/U2

Artist History In 1994, AJ Fink (Lead Vox and guitar) and Chris Johnson (Drums) started a band with a couple of their high school friends and called themselves vintage. About a year later, another local band (Remnant) that they had played with a few times was calling it quits and their bass player (Dan Spransy) was a prime candidate for their style. After playing out a few gigs, they decided to record a demo. Dan's dad had some experience producing in the past and agreed to work with the band for this demo. At the same time, the guys were thinking about adding a keyboard player. Dan's sister Anja had been playing the piano for a few years and was interested in joining the group. Her first experience with them was in the studio recording the demo. By the year 2000, the group had recorded one full-length cd and Anja had moved on to explore other areas of music and school. The band did however find a worthy replacement. Jesse Gyldenvand (Lead Guitar) and Tony Olla (Keyboards) were playing in another group that was a favorite of Jacobstone's, and shortly after Anja left, Jesse and Tony's group had disbanded. They came over to Jacobstone and the music has been at a whole new level since.

Group Members AJ Fink - Lead vocals and guitarDan Spransy - Bass and backup vocals.Chris Johnson - DrumsTony Olla - KeyboardsJesse Gyldenvand - Lead Guitar

Instruments Guitar, Keyboards, Bass, Drums

Albums Glass Top Ships; Chambers and Volumes EP, Regions

Press Reviews One of the bands making their Cornerstone debut this year is southern Wisconsin’s Jacobstone. Their uniquely passionate musical edge has already earned them some significant recognition and accolades, as well as a growing and devoted following. But with the release of their new album, Chambers And Volumes, and the unveiling of their amazing live show will likely make them one of the buzz bands of the year at Cornerstone 2001. Drummer Chris Johnson and vocalist / guitarist AJ Fink were friends before they were born. “Our parents were all friends before they were married so I guess it was just in the stars for us to be friends,” Fink explains. Laughingly Johnson adds “My earliest memory of creating any kind of music with AJ was in the First Aid room at Elmbrook Church. He had set up an amp and there was a drum set there. I went in, after not having played in months or years, and it just came to me. In the beginning there was never a spoken vision, it was just a really, really fun garage band of friends.” By 1995 the two began performing concerts as a duo and then began to flesh out Jacobstone. The first addition to the line-up was a bass player with a certain amount of destiny of his own to deal with. Dan Spransy grew up around music. Not just the typical story of a musical family, lots of records playing or singing at church though, he grew up on a tour bus. His father, keyboardist Matt Spransy, was a core member of the pioneering Christian rock band Servant. The son admits, though, that he didn’t always plan on following in his father’s footsteps. “I’ve been around music my whole life,” the younger Spransy confesses, “but I never really had too much of an interest in it. I just liked being on the bus and traveling and hanging out with my friends. I didn’t really respect what was going on. I mostly fell asleep during the concerts. It was like bedtime music. Every time I hear my dad’s CD’s I get tired.” The bug was in him though, and it came to the fore when at the age of thirteen the son expressed some interest in the bass guitar; an interest his father encouraged. “I have always had a really great respect for my dad and we’ve always had a really tight family,” Spransy says. Tight relationally and artistically it seems. Dan’s sister Anja Spransy joined the early version of Jacobstone as a keyboardist before departing for college and missions work at Youth With A Mission in Madison WI, and his other sister Linnea recently graduated with a fine arts degree from Yale University. That first incarnation of Jacobstone recorded an auspicious, if not fully realized debut at the home studio of the elder Spransy. After a limited custom release that project, Glass Top Ships was released on a broader level by True Tunes Records. In addition to receiving positive reviews from Christian and mainstream press the band was selected as one of the top independent bands in the country by Garageband.com, a site created by former Talking Head Jerry Harrison, Beatle producer George Martin and other luminaries. Harrison gushed over Jacobstone’s exuberant sound and the band scored multiple WAMI (Wisconsin Area Music Industry) award nominations and even an appearance on NBC’s Jenny Jones Show. As promising as that all was, the band had not quite discovered their “sound” when they debuted at the Gospel Music Association’s GMA week in 2000. Though their set was well received, it was really the swan song of the Jacobstone larvae. Anja had left the band and the remaining core members, Spransy, Fink and Johnson were looking for a replacement. What they found was much more. Spransy had known another local guitarist by the name of Tony Olla for several years. Though Olla had never played keyboards, he had plans to buy one and learn. When he heard that Jacobstone was looking for a keyboard player he did not think he was the right choice. “I had known Tony for three or four years as a really consistent guitar player,” Spransy says, “and as a very musical person. If he was going to do something it was going to be cool. I had never heard him play piano.” Fink recalls that Olla was anything but presumptuous. “Tony was sitting there saying ‘hey guys this could be really fun, but I’ll be honest, I’m not very good, I suck.’ He was convinced that he wasn’t good enough. It’s funny how that works though when you just kind of know what’s right before you even take a step.” The band asked the guitarist cum keyboardist to join before ever hearing him play. Johnson adds “I guess we got really lucky!” Olla had first come to Fink’s attention when he had been playing guitar in a band called Gabriel’s Judah (also called Aliens and Strangers) with a unique lead player named Jesse Gyldenvand. “I saw this band with these two guys playing this amazing music and I was reduced to tears,” Fink relates. Gyldenvand seemed destined to find a life in music as well. “I started goofing around playing my moms church music when I was about ten,” the guitarist explains. “My parents got me going on guitar lessons when I was about thirteen with an Irish folk musician. I learned a lot from him. I probably learned more by playing old Irish folk music and old country music than I’ve learned from any other teacher I had.” Gyldenvand had also had some exposure to Christian music early on. “I was into the good old Christian rock bands like Petra and Stryper and DeGarmo and Key. I met up with this guy at a Christian bookstore that at the time I thought was kind of strange. He tried to get me into all this other music and I thought he was crazy. He tried and tried and tried and finally I started listening to all the stuff he was listening to. The Violet Burning and The Prayer Chain were probably my link into more ambient music. From there it went into The Verve and so on.” Gyldenvand has developed a style and sound that is at once unique and classic. “I started doing kinda trippy music about seven years ago around the same time I started to play with a delay. It just completely fascinated me. I would turn the delay to the longest delay I could and let the feedback go for as long as I could and get as much song as I could possibly get to come out of tiny amplifier.” The fascination with effects has served him well. His current stage set-up includes vintage effects like a Memory Man delay, two analog tape delays, a Smallstone phaser, various analog effects and his soon to be trademark, a heavily effected electrical instrument called a Theriman (named after the inventor and featured on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and in most classic monster movies of the fifties and sixties. The combination of effects, perfectly selected parts, and the slashing tone of the Theriman give Jacobstone an all-new sound that completely absorbs all available space and literally beckons audiences into Fink’s oblique and often melancholy poetry. Lyrically Fink is as impressionistic as Gyldenvand is sonically experimental. “There’s a lot of frustration and lifelessness that I had been struggling with,” Fink says, “wanting to be able to play music with a certain group of people. I hadn’t achieved that and hadn’t met those people yet. When I finally did and it clicked it just changed me.” Fink describes his lyrics as verbalized descriptions of mental pictures, many of which he doesn’t even understand the meaning of until after they have been recorded and released. “Once they’re written - once they’re recorded I look back and I realize that I saw that picture because of what I was going through. I didn’t realize it at the time though.” At a recent concert in Nashville Fink got so into a certain moment in a song that he literally thrashed the microphone stand to bits. Ending the show in a heap on the floor of the stage with the band churning and burning through a brand new song, eyes and mouths were wide open. Jacobstone, who had struggled through their GMA debut in 2000, absolutely owned the place in 2001. The new record Chambers And Volumes almost didn’t happen. Spransy explains “We had planned to record an EP for a couple of tours we had in mind. The plan was to just record a few songs live in the studio for the fall tour and then to record a full-length album over the summer to release later. What ended up happening was that our label called us and asked us to do another round with them. I’m glad that it happened. We put extra tracks on there. There was one that we added because we had to fill more time. It is an instrumental ‘hidden’ track that turned out to be one of our favorites.” The band made major efforts to capture the newfound live energy in the studio. “We were all in one room recording live.” Fink says. “We had all the amps in one room, the keys direct to the board, and we tried to separate whatever we could with dividers. We felt it was important to be in the same room recording at the same time to keep the organic tone. We play off each other a lot.” The result is a project that is already garnering rave reviews and landing the band some major bookings. Though still essentially an indie (the band’s label True Tunes Records specializes in releasing independent recordings) Jacobstone is making major waves. The band is definitely excited to be playing at Cornerstone. Gyldenvand adds “It’s a great opportunity. I’ve been there since ‘93 or ‘94 every year except for one year. I’ve always wanted to play there. I’ve been in tons and tons of bands, but I’ve never played in a band that I felt it would be a good fit there. With these guys it’s perfect. It’s cool to think about it as being a big thing but I think honestly it’s just more people to play for and no matter where we go it’s always going to be a blast to play.” Jacobstone is playing on July 3rd at 8:55 PM on the pre-fest Gallery Stage with label-mates The Wayside. For more information on the band visit their web site at www.jacobstone.com. -Cornerstone 2001

Additional Info Jacobstone Demo; Suffleboard Single; Jacobstone Live 12/08/01

Location Milwaukee, Wisconsin - USA

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