Late Aster – Lo-Fi Experiments, Classical Roots, and Creative Discipline on the Virtual Sessions 9/29/25

Anni and Aaron, the duo behind Late Aster, bring a refreshing perspective that bridges classical training with electronic experimentation. Based in San Francisco, they share how their artist name reflects a balance between the natural and the celestial – Anni’s love of flowers and Aaron’s fascination with stars. Together, they craft music they describe as “jazztronica with brass,” blending brass instruments with electronic textures in an innovative hybrid style.

 

Their upcoming debut album City Living showcases this fusion, created with a vintage Tascam four-track cassette recorder. The duo explains how working within the limits of analog tape forced them to embrace imperfection, often recording live takes that highlight raw honesty. Tracks like Ctrl-F Discipline emerged from this process, where constraints became opportunities to rethink production and storytelling.

 

Beyond their technical approach, Anni and Aaron discuss how their perfectionist tendencies find balance in collaboration, and how embracing “wabi-sabi” – beauty in imperfection – shaped their latest work. Their creative journey is also guided by influences ranging from Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk concept to the bold reinvention of artists like Miles Davis.

 

They speak candidly about the challenges of translating studio recordings into live performances, often requiring intricate synchronization between horns, sequencers, and loop pedals. Yet, they thrive on the tension of live experimentation, pushing themselves to deliver unique experiences. Looking ahead, they remain dedicated to blending tradition with innovation, whether through lo-fi tape projects or fully produced modern releases.

 

Topics

0:06 – Origins of the Late Aster name and natural inspirations
1:49 – Defining their genre as jazztronica with brass instruments
5:35 – The concept of Gesamtkunstwerk and artistic integration
11:07 – Creating the album City Living with a Tascam four-track
16:05 – Embracing lo-fi aesthetics and analog challenges
23:15 – Letting go of perfectionism through live one-take recordings
30:22 – Collaborating with producer Charles Mueller on final mixes
39:23 – Musical upbringings, classical training, and early influences
43:06 – Biggest inspirations from Imogen Heap to Miles Davis
49:15 – Translating analog recordings into live stage performances

Connect with Late Aster

• Website: lateaster.com
• Instagram: @late.aster
• YouTube: Late Aster

[Darran]
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the DJ Sessions Presents the Virtual Sessions. I’m your host, Aaron, and I’m sitting in the virtual studios in Seattle, Washington, and coming in all the way from San Francisco, California, one of my favorite cities in the entire world, we have the two, the duo from Late Astor, Aaron and Anni. How y’all doing today?

[Late Aster]
Good, doing well, thanks for having us.

[Darran]
Awesome, let me just make sure there’s no echo from my studio speakers in the system. But I wanna go first, who’s the third guest we have in the background back there with the little kitty over your shoulder there, Aaron? Me, and she’s decided to be present for this interview as well.

What’s the name again? Me. Edie.

Edie, Edie, Edie, okay, Edie, well, we gotta maybe get Edie and Doja on a date together. Doja’s the Doja the Cat DJ mascot. I didn’t name him, and I don’t think the owners knew about Doja Cat when they named him, knowing that Doja Cat’s a woman.

And he’s a play cat, so it’s interesting having Doja running around, everyone’s like, why’d you name him after Doja? I didn’t name him, but it’s all cool. Yeah.

We encourage cats in the studio. First time being here, awesome to talk with you. Got some questions for you, gonna have some fun today on the DJ sessions.

First and foremost, though, a lot of people don’t know when I go into interviews with people, I treat it like I don’t know who you are. I don’t know who they are, or our fans don’t know who you are, even though you could be extremely popular around the world and awesome stuff. I’m really Annimated today, I don’t know why.

Didn’t even have my tea. But that being said, where did the name Late Aster come from? Because neither of your names have late or aster in them.

Good point. Good point.

[Late Aster]
We were looking for a name to kind of encapsulate, I guess, our inspirations for music, I think. And both of us are kind of fixated on the natural world to various degrees. I seem to be fixated in a little more granular way on the earth that I can see and touch.

And Aaron seems to be a little more fixated on things that are further away. So we came up with Late Aster because when we hike, I like to pay attention to the wildflowers, but I liked, and Late Purple Aster is actually a wildflower that I see a lot. But I liked that aster also means star because Aaron always wants to stay up and look at the stars, but I wanna go to bed early.

So I don’t make it to see the stars. But I do make it to see the star flowers. So there you go.

[Darran]
I’ve always wanted to take a vacation out to the middle of the Arizona desert or Mojave desert, somewhere way out in the middle of nowhere with no light pollution whatsoever and really see the Milky Way galaxy. He used to be able to do that when I was a kid. Growing up, it would be in our backyard.

I didn’t live too far away from Seattle, but 20 miles north of Seattle at that time was still the country. People don’t understand. I say, I grew up with cornfields and forests as far as the eye can see in my backyard, even though we were in suburbia.

But we used to lay out at night underneath the stars and we always would trip out. We didn’t think about it at the time, but then you’d see the, and they weren’t airplanes. And we thought they were UFOs, but then realized as you get older, they were satellites.

But you can see that your eyes would spend a night out in your campfire in the backyard with no campfire going. You can get that star light, you know, that there was moon wasn’t out. It was awesome.

So it’s really awesome. Can relate to that. And Aaron, your take on, you know, you both just said, boom, so are you the star part of Astor?

And then the flower part, or how does that? I think it, you know, I don’t know where, naming things is really tough. I’m not very good at it.

I think, like, I think we liked the dual nature purpose of the name, right? That it kind of had this like metaphysical interpretation as well as just like this literal interpretation. It’s literally a flower, but it also has this like connotation of kind of more celestial concepts.

So yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I think for me, it’s what’s in a name, I guess. I don’t know.

It’s a- Well, I’m definitely going to say it probably plays right into the genre of music that you produce. If you could describe that genre of music in three words, three, one, two, three words, what would you call it?

[Late Aster]
Oh no.

[Darran]
Okay. I stumped, yeah. So I think, I don’t think, I don’t know who came up with the term jazz tronica.

I don’t know if like we necessarily fit in that, but I think that’s kind of, that encapsulates a big part of what we do. And I think Sophie said jazz tronica with brass is kind of, that’s like our genre. So we both play brass instruments.

And I think that we kind of incorporate electronica into sort of like a jazzy. Yeah. Yeah, wow.

[Late Aster]
I’m not normally this popular.

[Darran]
It’s all good. No, I’ll take jazz tronica. We’ll take out the with.

Brass, jazz tronica brass. Okay. Awesome, that works.

You know what jazz tronica is? Like, do you have a association? I’ve never heard that term used before.

I hadn’t heard it either. I think it was like a Spotify thing that I saw. And I was like, oh.

Frequently have DJs that I bring on as resident DJs. And when I say I need you to, when they’re filling out their info for their resident form, their sheet, I say, okay, pick a few genres of music that you like to play. And I have a link and I go, go to Wikipedia and choose a form.

Now, when you go to the Wikipedia page for electronic music, it doesn’t just list the top 20 genres. It lists all the sub genres. When I saw that the first time I did that, I go, I came back to my team and I said, hey, you got to pick top level genres.

I’m not going to let you pick all these sub different genres and then say, I play house, trance, techno, boom. But psy trance, house, techno, electronic genre, that’s not a genre. You’re making things up now.

Or then you go find out that actually is a genre. You’re like, okay, right. And you can name anything, right?

It’s like, you can name it. Yeah, it’s interesting. But I’m really curious to find out, and I got to know this, cause I was on your website today and I’m not, it looks German-ish.

I’m wondering how, what is, and how do I pronounce, Gestamtkundestur? That’s close. That’s really good.

Gestamtkunstwerk is the word. Kunstwerk, okay. I’m supposed to be going to Berlin a lot next year.

So I got to brush up on my German. So, okay. Kunstwerk, you should have saw the Kunstwerk, yeah.

Okay. What is that? So our background is in classical music.

And so we have these kind of weird- Reference points. Yeah, weird esoteric reference points to classical music. So what Gestamtkunstwerk means is just like a complete work of art.

And so it kind of, the idea is that you draw from every potential, can you hear me? Oh, yeah. No, I got you.

I’m just sounding it out in my head, cause I’m like, I see the work now. I see work. W-E-R-K.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Complete work, okay. So you can pull from all different artistic mediums.

And so the original, originally it was coined kind of in Wagner’s time, like Wagner, the opera composer, who was like a, he’s like a German opera composer. He did like, Ride of the Valkyries and that kind of thing. My favorite.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so he thought opera was the Gestamtkunstwerk because it had music and literature. It had- Costumes.

Costumes and set design. It had poetry. So it just, it took, it was an art form that took in everything and used it all to kind of like produce this complete work of art.

And so I think that’s kind of how we think about, I mean, insofar as it’s possible to do, that is kind of our goal, is to kind of take everything, every facet of art that we can get our hands on and try to fuse it into the works that we do. The first person that came to mind, first, once you just laid that all out for me and defined that, awesome, and thank you very much for doing that, was Freddie Mercury. Yeah.

I was thinking like, wow, here you got this rock opera band, very theatrical. Yeah. Putting it together, you know, putting some, I was like, wow, I wonder if that could be used to describe Freddie Mercury.

I grew up, my dad listened to a lot of Queen. I listened to a lot of Queen, Super Tramp, Fleetwood Mac, all that fun stuff growing up. And my dad being as old as he was at the time, probably was listening to music that was not part of his generation, but we were still raised with it, but heavily influenced.

I love Freddie, Queen as a whole, Freddie, you know, putting everything together there. It’s kind of interesting. And thank you for the education.

I always like getting educated on interesting stuff that I don’t know. I’m gonna go out there and go, get in some good work. Okay.

I didn’t say I’d have to practice it. I’ll have to practice. I wonder how, I wonder how our transcription services is gonna.

Oh yeah. Yeah, maybe the German will get it right. Yeah.

But you have a single that’s releasing tomorrow. I’m glad we got you on the show today to talk about it before it. You can talk about it, right?

We can talk about this? Sure, sure, yeah. Now I know some people like to keep things under wraps till tomorrow and the release date.

And I can say, we got a release, but I didn’t want to give any hints or anything else, tell us about the release, Ctrl-F Discipline. I’m gonna, I can do Ctrl-F, but I got Command F, which is fine. What’s Ctrl-F?

Well, it’s for us Windows users, we don’t have the command icon, so we’ve got to use Ctrl-F. I guess I misidentified as a Mac user, didn’t I? We’re using a Mac, so that’s how I, cause otherwise I don’t know if I would have known about Command.

[Late Aster]
I’m not.

[Darran]
No, when I worked for Apple, we used to refer to the command key as the doggy paw print. Find the doggy paw print key, and now you can’t unsee it, right? Yeah, no, I wouldn’t have thought that.

No, Ctrl-F Discipline. Thoughts behind that? You’re releasing this tomorrow, tell us all about that.

Yeah, so maybe just, I think it’ll make sense if we, because I think explaining Ctrl-F Discipline might require that we explain where this album is coming from. So we’re releasing this album called City Living, and kind of the major set piece of this album is that we use this cassette mixer called a Tascam, the model is 414 MK2. Yeah, are you, yeah.

You’re gonna totally know why I’m laughing, because pre-show notes, remember pre-show notes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m super excited.

Yeah, so maybe I’m just spoiling, I’m spoiling the prep you did. No, you’re good, you’re good, you’re good. So anyway, so we’ve been making this music that was kind of lo-fi-y as a way of kind of like filling in our sets, like as when we perform live, it’s kind of, we’re like not really DJs, but we kind of, I mean, like we’re classical musicians, we play jazz, but we have all this electronic gear, and so we look like we’re DJs, and I think functionally we are DJs, but it’s like getting from song to song is really complicated, which I don’t know how hard it is if you’re using like a turntable set, but it might, it was complicated to get from song to song, so we created these kind of like interlude pieces that kind of comprise this album, but they kind of all leaned into lo-fi-ish beats, because that’s what we had at our disposal, and so we decided, well, we were like, well, so we could use like a plugin and just make like a lo-fi album, or we could try to make it sound like a lo-fi album, like for real, so we got this like Tascam cassette mixer, and one of the things, it’s complicated, and we can talk more about it if you have like any specific questions, but I think relevant to this song is that there’s only four tracks, which I think to the modern aesthetic, the modern producer is like, how do you do it all in four? Because you can just make, you know, just add new track, you can add hundreds of new tracks and make music that way. This is like imposes a serious discipline on the music creation, and this song, Control Have Discipline, was the only song where we had to like cheat a little bit, because it was like, I don’t know if you, like, it’s just, I think if you were making music in the time of cassettes and like tape, you know, tape in general, like what we went through sounds stupid, and like, you know, oh, these are just like kids, they don’t know anything, but to like learning all these things the first time, like punching in, like if you need to like fix something and you punch in, it sounds terrible. You know, in Pro Tools, you can just like crossfade easy peasy, you know, nobody knows, but if you try to punch in on this machine, you get like a, and then, so it’s impossible.

So we needed something to, we needed to punch ourselves in and we were trying it and it sounded terrible, and so we like made a little fudge in post. And so the title of the song originally was called Fuck Discipline, because we were like, well, fuck it, we’ll just do whatever we want. But, you know, I don’t know, I don’t know what you think about like explicit expletives in like naming conventions, but it seemed like the algorithms don’t like it.

And since we’re used to the algorithm, I was like, maybe we’ll just soften it a little bit. And I think it has the same meAnning, like you’re trying to find discipline. Anyway, so that’s why it’s called Ctrl-F Discipline.

It sounds like a Tame Impala song, in my opinion. I sing on it. Anni sings on it, we vocoded her vocals.

It’s got a pretty good beat, if I say so myself. And I don’t know.

[Late Aster]
Yeah, check it out tomorrow.

[Darran]
Oh, definitely will, definitely will. And you know, going to a technical side of things, we’re jumping ahead a few questions. I always love it because my next question would have fallen right into something, but I want to jump into this Tascam question because I grew up playing with a Tascam four-track recorder.

Yeah, yeah, okay. Like one of the original Tascam recorders. And they made them, it didn’t look exactly like that, but I can look at that and go, oh my gosh, I put so many hours playing with that thing.

[Late Aster]
Yeah, yeah.

[Darran]
My brothers were musicians and my dad kind of lavished upon them a home studio. And in the eighties, probably at that time with the amount of money he spent to get it, even before computers came into play, probably would have been a good 50 to $75,000. No, no, no.

And like rack mounts, eight-track recorders, four-track recorders, instrument gear, they were punk rockers, but gave them the ability to basically make albums in their studio. And four-track Tascam was one of the first things my brother got kind of as a toy. And I would go in there and play with it.

One of the cool things that he learned that he would do with it is he would take the Tascam, bounce four tracks in, and then go take all four of those tracks, bounce to one master tape, then bring the master tape in as one full track, and then layer the other ones on tracks two, three, and four. Most people didn’t know at the time that cassette tapes had two tracks on each side for stereo left and right audio, but the Tascam of course records the one, two, three, and four. Yeah.

You know, this total analog kind of crap that I grew up with that I’m playing with. Kids were playing G.I. Joe and He-Man, and I’m playing with synthesizers and rack mounts, and like, this is cool! And that led into my kind of technical nature things.

Of course, I went to the video camera that dad had bought. My brothers went to the music equipment, hence why I’m a video or an executive producer of a video show, you know? But I love seeing technology.

Like, hearing about people still utilizing technology like that in production and releasing it, you know, that’s just phenomenal what you can still do with, I wouldn’t say the old gear, I mean, it’s still relevant, but to create a sound and create something and mix that down, and you’re right, the process of going through that is way harder than music, but you know, than digital software-based music production. It’s still hard to do that stuff too, don’t get me wrong, but you’re watching the barrier to entry of music production go down, DJ go down, even distribution go down.

You know, I think there is a little bit of, excuse me, a little bit of, I was just talking with somebody about this this morning from Milan about the ease of people thinking it’s easy to put something out there just because you can have the tool, the tools are now accessible, that how much, I don’t want to knock anyone and say that anyone’s creative endeavors is garbage, in any way, shape, or form, but you just get so much content pushed out now that how do you sort through it, how do you find it?

Even, like you mentioned just a few moments ago, if you use the word fuck, discipline, the algorithms can penalize you for that, you know? And it’s like, whoa, how am I supposed to get content out and self-distribute and be picked up? People may not take me seriously because it says fuck, you know?

I just recently signed up my shows to be syndicated through Broadcast Radio, and you’d be amazed when you get to the company that does this, the rules and regulations of FCC, of how, if I even took this episode and put it up and I bleep out the word when I send it up there, I have to tell them about what I bleeped out, when I bleeped it out, and for how long that bleep-out lasted for. It’s like, wow, can I just bleep it out? Yeah.

Like, no, you have to tell them what you said. Yeah. I’m like, wow.

It’s not that big, horrendous of a process, but yeah, I can, everything you gotta take into consideration now with creativity of putting something out there and the work of getting out there, you know, it’s just, it’s a lot more. I think that’s so cool you’re using technology like that to complete a project and experiment and release as well. It’s not just, I’m just doing this as a project.

We’re actually releasing this and putting it out there. And I hear a lot of artists talk about their tracks or like their babies or their children, and they let them go out and live and see what happens. My curious question is, is you took this, you went analog, did you do any of the pre-production with all the instruments analog as well?

Like your horns, I’m assuming, are analog. Then they went into the four-track recorder. Was there a synthesizer or something you did as a synthesizer?

I think I saw, maybe there was some tape on the, I can probably have a picture of it. I can go over to a screen, screen share, but is it live synth or was it like any, like sequencer type things that you had to match within there or how did that all come about? So this is why I think we’re not DJs, but we function, we operate as DJs, I think, when we perform.

So we’ve got MIDI running through synthesizers, drum machines, like modular synths and analog synths and the like. So, and I think for the most part, because I think maybe like, it sounds like your brother like really added shit together. Sorry, I’m not gonna criticize.

No, no, they couldn’t read a book or manual to save their life. And I’m the one who’s eight years old, getting the manuals, reading them from Japanese translated into English. Yeah.

Okay, push this button. Yeah, you were helpful. That’s nice.

Okay, push this button. No, then I get my ass kicked for playing with their gear in the studio. I’m in their bedroom, I had to sneak in there and play with the gear and then they go, what was that?

Well, that was really cool. Show me how to do that. I go, well, it’s really easy.

You just read the book and go. Right, if you just, it is helpful. Yeah, I think there are a lot of tricks to this task game that we never really learned.

I tried, right? I did the manual diving and whatnot, but because like the idea of like putting it all onto one track and then like having a master track that you can record to one, like that was complicated, I did a few times, but for the most part, we just tried to do everything live in one take. And to do that, we needed kind of like a lot of synchronized gear.

But so yeah, like everything, like the drum machine and the synthesizer and the synthesizers and effects pedals and whatnot, like those were all happening on the front end. So there aren’t really effects that happened in post. We did bounce them down to four tracks so that we could mix them a little more fine-tuned before we kind of like printed everything.

But yeah, pretty much everything is happening on the front end as it’s being recorded. In a process like that, the next question I ask here, how much of a perfectionist are the both of you? And in a process like that, how much of that had, if you are like, if there’s a level of zero to 100, of course you have to have some level of perfection because you got to keep your music on time, I guess.

But as far as being a perfectionist, if you consider yourself like I’m a 100% perfectionist, how does that work in an analog live recording environment? And you go, we got to do the whole thing all over again. Yeah, that’s a really good question.

[Late Aster]
Yeah, I think that was actually one of the more interesting elements of that medium. It really forced us to let go. Like you kind of like, you know, wabi-sabi and that’s what happens.

What? Yeah, like that’s actually what I was, in terms of the, it’s like there was the discipline of the only four tracks and then there was just the kind of letting go. And I think that’s like something that I love about the record is that because punching in wasn’t even feasible, like most of the performances are just kind of like live, you know, one take wonders.

And that’s actually something that’s kind of cool in today’s world, I think, because people, when you’re listening to music, you have no idea like how it’s being made. And this record is like, we could tell you how it was made and you could imagine it happening and it wouldn’t be like that complicated.

[Darran]
Do you want to add something? It’d be interesting if you had just the thought, if there was like a behind the scenes recording of every song that went along with it, that’s like, if it was like back in the days when you could get the CD, but the CD was a DVD, but the DVD was like this and here’s the hook, I don’t know.

[Late Aster]
Well, what’s cool is I actually got out my phone and recorded Aaron singing his part for the song that’s being released tomorrow and he ended up being the performance.

[Darran]
Nice, nice.

[Late Aster]
I actually have a video of Aaron doing like, at least like his part to that song. And we have a video of you doing the trumpet for Virtuous, another track. So we actually do have, it’s like, what’s so cool about it, it’s like, cause I didn’t know what I was doing at the time.

I was like, oh, I’m just going to video record this. And then it was like, oh, that’s the take. We’re done.

[Darran]
You know, it goes back to my early, early, early film days. Everyone thought I was crazy cause I wanted to be a TV producer, but I did make some short films in college in the class that I was in. And one of my favorite mediums is the continuous shot.

And you usually only get a few takes, times to do a continuous shot. My first film, I think it was 10 and a half minutes and it was a continuous take. It made sense to me.

Yes, the soundtrack was done by DJ Shadow. I didn’t make the music for it, but I used it perfectly. How I wanted to tell it and what I wanted, well, I didn’t have the budget to do it.

I wanted to do, had I had, but the concept was still there. And same for the second one that I made, which became the first film in the series, kind of a little bit of a prequel. Second one becomes the prequel to the main one.

But yeah, I’m really a fan of the first take. And, you know, I think both of those, the first film I did, I did two takes and I ended up merging them later on to a jump to a cut, but I mean, basically two takes. And in one of them, I actually was walking backwards with the camera and I ran into a wall and fell into the wall.

I sat there and held the camera until they got up and I got up and kept going. And the second take, if you see us coming down the hallway, we found this big chalkboard, like noteboard thing and put it in front of the hole so you couldn’t see it. It’s pretty funny.

But I mean, even on the second version, I did one take coming in for the establishing and then one take of the onsite, you know, shot. But I mean, it took a whole day of production to do these like 10 minute shoots. So I can relate to trying to get it all in one take, you know, especially, you’re obviously accomplished, professional musicians.

I was working with, you know, student actors, if we could call them that, and with a student producer, student cinematographer, you know, trying to get everything to line up. It was interesting. So congratulations on putting that together.

I know it’s a feat in itself for being in production and in the studio like that. Can we just say on a scale from one to a hundred, how much of a perfectionist we think we are? Yeah, yeah, go for it.

I’m gonna let you go first.

[Late Aster]
You’re gonna let me go first? How much, like how much of a perfectionist we normally are?

[Darran]
No, what was the question? The question was like, how much of a perfectionist are you and like how did- I’m a 98. I think I’m like a 75.

Do you ever find yourself in a position where you literally have to have somebody say, no, like Erin, do you have to go, no, this is going, or do you have to go, no, this is fine now? Like, you want to put something out, Erin? And Anni says, and I keep saying Anni, but it’s not Anni, is it?

[Late Aster]
It’s Anni.

[Darran]
Anni, thank you, Anni. Anni, do you have to say, this is perfect and this is going out? I mean, is there any- Yeah.

Connotation differences on what is right and what is not in- I would never- Executive power, what gets released and what doesn’t? I would never say that anything that I produce is perfect. So just right off the bat, I don’t think, but yeah, no, I think there are things that we do that can’t, like the magic of the moment, it can’t be improved upon, in my opinion, even if it’s like not perfect.

And I think that, as Anni was saying, I think that this album kind of required some of that from us. So it was actually, I was like fine with it.

[Late Aster]
But I mean, obviously- This album was an exercise in me coming to Erin.

[Darran]
Yeah. Because- Go ahead, Erin. I mean, yeah, like if we were, I don’t feel like an expert on this machine.

We spent a lot of time with it. I do feel like I’m probably better than average now at using it. But if we had spent years working on it, maybe I would have been able to kind of feel like I had the control over the machine.

But also, we bought one and it didn’t work. And I tried to fix it and it was like just a rabbit hole that was like never. So anyways, we had to buy another one.

And that one kind of had, the one we ended up using had some quirks that aren’t like manufacturer standard, right? Some of the tracks don’t quite work the way that they’re supposed to and they don’t record. If you kind of record it in the wrong way, it’s not gonna work.

So anyways, there was just like fundamental limitations with the equipment that we had that required, it wasn’t just the fact that we weren’t, I wasn’t that good at using it. Because also, it was just like, it’s just an old machine. They don’t make the parts anymore, right?

You can’t, the only way to fix them is to have taken another machine that has parts. Yeah, just kind of grave robbing these old machines. So, and you work with Charles Mueller, correct?

How much, was this like, you two sat down, put this thing, okay, Charles, go work your magic. Or was he part of the integral process of working with you through all this as well? Or do you have a hand in this production of the track and album?

[Late Aster]
Well, to be honest, this was Charles’s idea. He was like, hey, stop using Pro Tools and just make it lo-fi. Which, you know, so thank you, Charles, for sending us down the rabbit hole.

[Darran]
That’s true.

[Late Aster]
And then we were on the phone a lot with Charles, probably.

[Darran]
Yeah, we did ask Charles if you know. So what happened was, I think we, Charles was like, I think you should at least mess around with this, because like I’m- And he was probably laughing under his breath. Normally what happens is I send him these horrible, mangled Pro Tools files, and he has to kind of like turn them into something good.

And he was like, why don’t you just do something yourself? And here’s a great way to do it. And so I think it was like a way to make his load easier in mixing our music.

But so anyways, we did, like I said, we bounced the four tracks down individually, and then we sent them to Charles. And so Charles had kind of the last kind of like massaging of the material before it was finished. That’s normal.

That’s the typical process, I would say. If you could give one production tip, tip or insight to new producers out there, especially looking to explore in a medium that is an analog-based medium, or analog to digital, because obviously you’re gonna have to convert it all to digital to get it out there, unless you’re slinging cassette tapes from the back of a trunk. You know, that’s how people start.

There you go, right on. You know, I like the fact that the cassette tapes are coming out. Even vinyl is making a little bit of a comeback.

In a sense, you can do single pressing a vinyl, you know, which is awesome. But any tips, one tip, production tip, insight to new producers out there, or artists out there, what would that be? Deep breaths.

[Late Aster]
What?

[Darran]
It’s a patience game. Go ahead, you can give a real tip. Well, I don’t know.

I mean, I think there’s such a wealth. I mean, I don’t need to tell young people this, because I think they understand better than I do, that just anything you want to know is out there. So there’s no reason to just bang your head against the wall.

Although that can be useful. Like anything you want to know, it’s like somebody is doing it. Like when the machine was broken, and I was just like YouTube diving, and people were teaching me like the components of the machine.

And it was like, there’s like the internet as its own manual in and of itself. So you can, yeah, like, but one thing I will say that was interesting, and I think it was kind of another reason why we ended up having to perform everything in one take, or, you know, like, we couldn’t really mix match, is that, and you probably know this, I didn’t know this, that when these cassette recorders, when they record, they have their own internal clock. They’re not tied to any external, you know.

So when you play it, it’s going to play back at a different time than when you recorded it. So if you’ve got a drum machine and a sequencer, and you try to do them separate, you’re like, I don’t know where this is going. Yeah, so it’s just not going to work.

You have to do them at the same time. And so having to record a lot of this stuff at once, right? So if we had a synthesizer that was sequenced and a drum machine that was sequenced, we had to record them at the same time.

We couldn’t record them separately in separate takes. And that, yeah, I think that was also another kind of discipline limiting factor. I think that was one of the craziest, I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that the TASCAM machine that we had.

Which one was it? Oh God, it was, it almost looks like dead. This is 1985, so I could go online and look it up and see which one, and be like, that’s the exact same one.

But it was the gray, it was gray. It, you know, I remember it being gray. I remember- It had weird knobs.

What?

[Late Aster]
It’s probably the one you have.

[Darran]
It had the, it had the turn, it didn’t have knob, like knob, it had the flat panels, I think. I think it had knobs. The one we bought that, or the, yeah, the one that we got that was broken was, had color, like it was a mixer, but the knobs were all colorful.

It was really cool. Yeah? Yeah, that’s the same one.

[Late Aster]
Yeah, I can show you.

[Darran]
Yeah. Now it’s just- It was like a turn dial, right? Was it a knob or was it a turn?

Maybe it was a dial, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know how- Anyways, long story short, I remember, I think the one thing, and this is where I learned the term packing the tape. And packing the tape was, you went, I think when you fast forward or rewound the tape, if you rewound it all the way to the beginning, you’d get this, it’d go to the beginning and then go.

Because what it’d be doing is it’d be spiraling and making sure the tape got packed. So upon playback, there was no drag. Yeah, oh.

Because if you had loose reels, the playback would be all really warped because it wasn’t on the right timing. So I’d pack it. And I remember my brother would go in there with the pencil and crank and- Wow.

And make it so it was packed and then put the tape in. And that way it was usually always the same playback. Now that was genius.

I don’t know where he came up with that one from or where he learned that trick from.

[Late Aster]
Did that help?

[Darran]
We did not have the internet back then. No, totally. I don’t even think we really had a guitar center back then.

My dad went to some place down in San Francisco and walked in and said, I want to finance a studio for my son. And next thing you know, we get all these boxes with- Maybe, you know, a Chroma Polaris keyboard. I don’t know if the name rings a bell.

It was supposed to be the hottest keyboard of the time. Of course, could have got a Yamaha back then. It would have been cooler.

But, you know, we did have some Yamaha gear. Can’t remember the eight track that we had there, but a number of other stuff. But yeah, yeah.

Packing the tapes. And nobody, you know, you don’t think about that unless you’re an audio engineer or a studio engineer going, okay, I gotta make sure it’s- And then the wobble. The tape can move across the head.

People didn’t understand that. It’s like, oh, you can hear the wobbling. They’re like, you’re crazy, Dad.

I’m like, no, I’m not. Okay, I’m just, I guess I’m crazy nerd kid that knows audio stuff. But yeah.

All that technical stuff. That’s a lot of challenge. That’s a lot to put into production nowadays.

So congratulations on making that endeavor a reality. I can’t wait to hear it all. You know, when it comes to, you’ve been playing, Aaron, for the horn.

Are you like, no, let’s go down to bio for a long, long time. And let’s see. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.

It was right in front of me. I shouldn’t scroll through questions while I’m doing interviews. It gets me off topic.

But you’ve been playing instruments and doing this for a long time. Did you come from a musical family? Both of you come from musical families, or was this something you did growing up?

Because you’re an attorney, after the check. Are you both attorneys, or is it you and Charles are the attorneys? You’re not an attorney.

And how did you go from music growing up to, oh, I’m going to go to law school. Why are you still going to do music? How did that process all work out?

So I do have a musical family, I think. I don’t think we were more classical musician-oriented. So my training is in classical music.

So I play trumpet, and I’ve been playing trumpet since I was a little kid. And, well, I don’t know. I think this project, which is the Gesamtkunstwerk of my whole time, my whole artistic progression, I think was the thing that was most important to me as I kind of left music school and was trying to go out in the world and do things.

And I felt like I was doing a lot of stuff that I didn’t really want to be doing, which is just like a very childish way of seeing the world. But that was just the way that I saw it. So I just was like, well, I could do something else and fill in time doing other things that I enjoy, and then have this piece of music continue, like this story of my life through art, like continue.

And I don’t know, I wouldn’t have said that it would have worked out and that I would continue to be making music after law school, but I don’t know. It has kind of worked out in that way. Anni, what about you?

How did you get involved with music production, creation, something you’ve always done?

[Late Aster]
Or is this something that- Yeah, no, I mean, I don’t know if I came from a musical family, but I became obsessed with playing a musical instrument, just like Aaron and our peers in middle school. And so, and it was like a real obsession. I was like, I wanna do this.

And it was very blind, very, maybe one of the easiest decisions I ever made. Other decisions are very difficult, but being a musician- She’s a 98% perfectionist. But yeah, being a musician felt very easy.

Anyway, so like Aaron, we both studied classical music in college. And I went on to, now I play with a wind quintet, and that’s my full-time job, is like touring around the country, playing music. But when I was in college, I actually kind of was like a little bit like down about just playing the French horn.

It got to be very stressful, like only playing this one instrument and kind of being a perfectionist and beating your head against the wall. So I started looking for other ways of being a musician, because I always loved all kinds of music. So I started actually playing an acoustic guitar and writing my own songs as kind of a way to express other avenues of the craft.

And I actually have these hilarious recordings of me using my old laptops to record. And the laptops would be pooping out, so you’d hear them struggling to record me, which now I actually kind of love. But yeah, so that’s basically where my engineering skills ended.

So I started trying to make music with people who had better engineering skills than I, and but only a little bit better, but Charles is pretty good, yeah.

[Darran]
And who would you say would be your biggest influence, Anni, when it comes to your career as an artist and why?

[Late Aster]
My biggest influence? You know, I don’t know who my influence is. Like, I’m so inspired by, like, I’m so inspired by, like, Imogen Heap or something, just because I feel like she, like, she’s just such a badass, like, engineer and producer, like, and songwriter and creative.

And, like, she played, she played, like, classical instruments as well. She played, like, clarinet and cello. And so, like, when I hear her music, like, and I don’t know if that’s, like, cliche, because I know everybody loves hide-and-seek and whatever, but, like, when I hear, like, her music, it’s so lush and, like, complicated.

So, like, you know, there’s, like, people like that. I love Sia. Like, I always wanted to be, like, a ghostwriter for Rihanna, you know?

Like, I still do. Like, I still wish I could get Rihanna to pick up- Yeah, like, call me. I have songs for you, you know, if you’re interested.

Like, I don’t know. I just, like, like, I love, like, I love, like, learning and hearing about these, like, artists and I love, like, Gillian Welch, which we have a track on the album, a cover of Look at Miss Ohio. Like, I love that song because it feels like it reminds me of that time when I did just kind of sit and play guitar and sing.

And that was, like, the way I liked making music in just, like, a very acoustic style. I really love Patti Griffin. She’s, like, so prolific in her songwriting.

Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know who, like, I don’t know if I’m, like, influenced as much as just, like, inspired by, like, all these artists.

[Darran]
Totally understand. When people ask me usually what my favorite top movies are or top artists are, I’m like, here, pick from the list. I can’t, and not in any particular order.

I mean, I do have, like, my top 10 films of all time. If you ask me, I’ll go one, two, three, four, five. Okay, cool.

But I probably have over 250 movies I’ve memorized in my life. Like, literally, you don’t want to watch a movie with me. When I say, I’m sorry, I memorized it, I’m going to say every single freaking word.

They’re like, huh? And they don’t believe me. And they’re like, okay, what’s coming up next?

Okay, ready? So, Ray Stantz is going to say to Pete Baikman right here. I’m getting Doug Lester’s reference.

I can’t even preface it like that. But, Aaron, how about you and your, who’s been your biggest influence when it comes to your, biggest influence when it comes to your career as an artist and why? I think a lot about Miles Davis.

I think, in part, because I’m a trombone player, but in part, just because I think he, I think the way that I think about music and art making is maybe most influenced by the way that he, I remember reading his, like, autobiography. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. It’s an incredible document.

And, because he just, he is just such a badass. And he, the way he thought about, like, making art, it was so profound. So anyway, so I think that’s probably, when I think about, like, making music, I think he, I don’t think Miles knew about the Gesamtkunstwerk, like, concept, but I think that he was trying to do that too.

And I think, like, he never looked back, music, like, artistically, he was like, I remember, he, it wasn’t until, like, the 90s. Like, he was making music from, like, the 40s until the 90s, and he, like, felt like he was changing his style, like, every time he made an album, and it was always changed. And he just, like, he’s like, I don’t want to play that old stuff anymore.

I can’t even listen to it. And I sympathize with that. Maybe I’m not making, you know, maybe it’s not as good as what Miles was doing, but I do find that it’s difficult to look back and hear the things that I’ve done in the past and think that it is, like, it just, it feels, I think it’s easier to think about it when you think about, like, you know, philosophy and how philosophy kind of stays present, even though, like, you can look back and read.

And music, I think music is like that too, where, like, it’s like, if you look back at the old music, it has that, it has an old philosophical that doesn’t quite, like, bent, that doesn’t quite fit onto the present moment. I, like, I think that’s what Miles, like, believed, and I think I agree, so, you know. You know, I had the privilege of being in a, oh, a kind of an interview session, presentation session with Carl Cox, very big, well-known producer, DJ, like, one of the world’s top producers, DJs.

And in that meeting, I was very honored to be there. We got in last minute as press. I got to sit in the back of the room with, like, 200 to 300 people, and he got up on stage, and he’s well-known for reinventing himself.

And so he gets up on stage, there’s a demo up on stage, and everyone’s like, oh, he’s gonna do something. He goes, here’s what I’m doing. I’m reinventing myself, in a nutshell.

And yes, I know, this is, like, my 26th time or something like that to reinvent myself. But staying ahead with what technology does, and one of the things that he did in doing this, and, you know, you could take it from somebody that’s really pushing the envelope, doing something new and forward, or at least just growing with the times, and not just being stuck, you know, there, that you’re constantly pushing something. You don’t look back.

You look back on when you looked back, but it got you to where you’re here. You know, and you’ve never gotten broken out of that mold. You never would have got to here doing this new stuff.

But one of the things he did is he would have one CDJ to play the music on, and then he had a laptop. And when you go to see a DJ play, they play on two turntables, basically, two CDJs, and they’re playing the music. Well, his new thing is he would play a song on the CDJ, which would be the track, but then he would make live music on the fly.

And he’d go, you’re never gonna, when I do this kind of setup, you’re never gonna see me play the same show twice. Yeah, cool. You know, and so you’re getting a unique experience, and he could read the crowd and go, I’m gonna do this within my song, boom.

Now he could play that hot track that he wants to play, maybe it’s one of his own, but then he can go over here and make a live performance. And I didn’t see it till last year. I mean, I should have, I’m sure he’s been doing a lot, but I’m working with an event that I’ll be covering hopefully later this year.

And he was on last year’s lineup, and it said Carl Cox, you know, headlining the show, but it said live mix, like live. It was, there was a term he used for it, but it wasn’t like live mix, because everyone’s mixing live, but it was gonna be his live stage performance that I think a lot of artists in that electronic music world will go to. I mean, your form, I was gonna ask you this earlier, is, you know, seeing some of the studio videos that you’ve done and production in the live, how do you duplicate your album live on stage to match what people might expect to hear off the album, but it’s a one-take kind of performance that was recorded?

Is that easy to duplicate on stage? Or could there be like, okay, we might mess up just a little bit during this, and the midis might not trigger at the right, or something might happen, or is that doable in your current stage setup? Because there’s a lot of pads and a lot of, I saw all the tech.

I mean, I’d have a field day. That’s like candy to me. I’m like, yeah, plug in, plug, plug, plug, plug.

This is fun. Can we hire you, Darran, to come do our show setup for us? If you would, I would appreciate it.

But no, I mean, how do you translate that from kind of studio production to stage production?

[Late Aster]
I mean, this idea was the inspiration for an EP we made because the first EP we made, we realized that it was gonna be very challenging to do it. And so for the very first EP we made, we basically just kind of leaned into the performance not being exactly what the album was, which just allows for a whole other creativity. Then the next EP we made, which was Light Rail Sessions, we made that with the intention of making something that could be basically just done live.

So that was an album we recorded in the studio in one day. And actually that was super fun because then when we went on tour, we were just like, boom, like we have all this choreography down. It’s gonna be exactly, exactly what you hear aside from the vocal and the brass performances.

This record that we’re putting out, I’ll let Aaron take a stab at this. I have no idea how we are gonna perform it live. It might have to be very creative.

[Darran]
I’ve got some ideas. I think one thing I will say, just because you said it looked complicated and that you didn’t think that it would be easy to move to other stages, it was not. We’re plugged in together in like 28 different ways.

It was actually a total nightmare. One of the things that we did in one of the songs, just as an example, is we have a loop pedal for our brass instruments. And that loop pedal is connected MIDI to everything else, right?

So we have, everything’s on one click. So we’ve got a drum machine, synthesizers, sequencers, all that stuff. It’s all one click.

And it goes down to our pedal board for our horns. And so we have a looper that’s like on that MIDI. Okay, so we try, one of the songs we do loops through the whole song and it’s kind of this like syncopated thing that Anni and I like trade off playing horn, trumpet, horn, trumpet, horn, trumpet.

And what we ended up having to do was I put an earbud in my ear and I turned on a metronome and then I counted us off. And then, and so- Oh, I had an earbud too. Do we both?

[Late Aster]
Yeah, I could hear the metronome too.

[Darran]
Oh, right, so we both had to have the metronome. Anyway, so we both had an earbud in our ear. I counted us off.

I clicked the looper. It started, it started in the time. And if we mess that up, the whole song is just totally- We never messed it up, it’s fine.

We never messed it up, was the punchline, that’s right. Anyway, so it was not easy and it was very nerve-wracking because it felt very like we’re in a rocket ship and if we don’t push the right buttons in the right sequence, the ship’s gonna explode. It was like that for pretty much every song.

Well, that’s the fun of live performance, right? Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. I mean, who knows what it’s like if you just got a guitar and you’re just gonna play it, right?

Absolutely. If you two could score a Hollywood movie and you could pick a director that you’d want to score for, who would be your preference? If you said, I really like this guy’s cinematography, the way they direct, the way their films are.

Do you have anyone in mind that you would say, ah, I’d love to do the scoring for said director?

[Late Aster]
Oh my goodness, what a question. Aaron’s gonna have to think about this.

[Darran]
I’ve got some ideas, but why don’t you go ahead?

[Late Aster]
I don’t, who? I’m really bad with like knowing what I’m watching when I watch films. I don’t even know who’s in it.

[Darran]
If they’re doing a Dumb and Dumber 3, I think Anni is going to be, that’s, Anni’s like the scientist. That’s okay, one of my best friends, she loves Love is Blind, The Circle, whatever, all those reality-based television shows. I watch them, I get a kick out of them, but I couldn’t tell you anything about who’s, I have to sit there and go, okay, why did they hate the person for doing what did they do over here?

What’s going on? And hit it, and she fills me in on everything. Okay, now the show’s fun, but if you’re gonna get me on Star Wars, okay, it’s game over.

Yeah, yeah, well, that, yeah, I mean, that’s a whole, like the opera, the space opera thing is tough. Like you just really, you really gotta have your shit together. That’s right.

Okay, that’s, would you, Dumb and Dumber 3?

[Late Aster]
No, that’s not, I don’t know. I don’t know, like, I don’t know what, like what, I don’t know what director, like, would speak the most to like what we, I think there’s directors that I love, but I don’t think we should be scoring their movies. That’s a good point, that’s a good point.

[Darran]
I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms.

[Late Aster]
I’m trying to think, like, what director would actually, like, you know, fit with our, I don’t know. It’s a good question.

[Darran]
Thank you, I love skumping people on the show.

[Late Aster]
What’s the name, we actually went on this little movie binge recently. Do you know who’s the- Monica Leighton? Well, that’s the actress.

Who’s the director, though? Anja, it’s like Michael AnjAnnini or something. It’s like an Italian director.

And the lead, what?

[Darran]
Red Desert was one of the movies. Red Desert was one of the- And it was La Ventura.

[Late Aster]
La Ventura, but it was this director, I think his last name was, like, Michael AnjAnnini or something, Michael AnjAnnini. Anyway, his movies all feature this, like, beautiful actress, Monica Vitti. So he, like, became, it’s like, it seems like all of his movies are kind of, like, this creative endeavor to, like, filming her.

And she’s gorgeous, like, so we get it. It’s like, yeah, I mean, if you could make your career filming her. Anyway, but actually, I think those films, I think our music actually would go well with, because they’re very, they are very, like, photographer-esque films.

And the plots don’t really matter too much. And they’re more just, like, this aesthetic experience. No, you should check those out.

That was great.

[Darran]
Are you talking about Michael Angelo Antononi’s? Sure. Red Desert?

Red Desert, yeah, yeah, that sounds right. Okay. No, I mean, because it came out in 1964.

[Late Aster]
Yeah.

[Darran]
Okay, cool. Anyway, we, I was like, I just want to make sure I was looking at the right one. But yeah, I think definitely the age of cinematography, it changed, I’d say, really around, you know, when you saw Star Wars, and I know I brought up Star Wars a few times, but when you saw Lucas come out and do Star Wars and the lighting, the design, and the intricacy, what he did, and they even said at the same time when Star Wars came out, it was going up against Planet of the Apes.

And Star Wars had no named actors, no one in there was named. I mean, Harrison Ford had done a couple roles, but nobody else was known. I mean, the voice of James Earl Jones is Darth Vader, but even he didn’t have a huge career, but you had Charlton Heston playing in Planet of the Apes, and both films had about the same production budget.

I think it was somewhere around 10 million, 15 million, something like that. And they were scared that they weren’t going to buy into this whole fantasy Star Wars thing, and boom, here comes a blockbuster. Planet of the Apes did well, from what I understand.

But you look back at the cinematography of how films were done, and obviously it went from stage to TV and film, they still direct, you’re right, I think the cinematography back then was more precise, because they, I mean, even though I’m not knocking on any cinematographers now, please don’t murder me out there or anything, okay? But you’re right, it was shot from, I started out doing photography. I mean, I played with video cameras, but I loved the still camera, and then you have to set up your shot, and it’s on film, and I’m not knocking any digital photographers nowadays, but hitting a button and having to go, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and hit 50 shots, and then going, oh, I’ll take the good one out of that.

Right, right. Where you have to sit there and make sure the lighting is great, and you have to, if you want to do different lightings, you have to control all your stuff inside of there, nothing’s auto done for you, and you’re shooting on different grains, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, knowing all that stuff, I look back, and that was very, you’re shooting on film, obviously, back then there was no digital process, so you had to light correctly, you had to set up the shot, and it was costly, if you didn’t get the shot right. Yeah, I think it’s a little bit more painstaking, the, it’s a lot more pain involved when you’re shooting with film than when you’re shooting in digital, or to go into analog production, and one-take production, that’s, I commend that.

[Late Aster]
Yeah, but these films from the 60s are like that, they’re like, it’s like very, yeah, it’s like these painstaking shots, and it feels kind of raw and honest in that, like, in this hyper-aesthetic kind of way, and I think that’s what Aaron and my music is like, I think that’s like what’s cool about it, is it’s not overproduced, it’s like, it’s kind of raw, and there’s an honesty, and certainly in this album we’re releasing, we’re really leAnning into the imperfections of it.

[Darran]
Now, when you’re doing all this music stuff, and you wanna stop, like, you wanna take a break, what do you do to do, what do you do when you’re taking a break from doing all this stuff? You live in San Francisco, one of my favorite cities in the entire world, one of the most beautiful cities, I love going down there and visiting all the time, I love the culinary, the food, the actual international feel, even though San Francisco’s number eight, I think, on the DMA, Demographic Market Area, Seattle’s number 12, but I find that San Francisco’s a much more metroplex, metropolitan city, and Seattle, people think, because we have Amazon, Microsoft, and big compAnnies, and Boeing used to be here, kind of, you know, that we’re this big, but no, San Francisco’s big, and you got the BART. I love BART. You got BART.

We have something kind of similar, but it’s not BART. I think BART’s awesome. But no, I mean, what do you prefer to do when you’re taking a break from music?

Like, you get to go out and about the city, go check out other artists, go to shows, what’s a day in the life of Bonnie and Erin, after the music’s, after you’re out of the studio?

[Late Aster]
I think we have a lot of trouble focusing on music, because we’re trying to do so much stuff outside, because San Francisco’s just so beautiful, you know, like, going on, like, hikes, and backpacking, and bike rides. Like, San Francisco’s just, like, the perfect city for, like, your day trip, you know? So, but yeah, but, like, we love going to restaurants and checking out the food, and, like, and we’ve been to some pretty cool shows in the city, too.

There’s a lot of venues, like, really close to us. We live in the Mission, so, like, it’s pretty easy to check stuff out. Yeah, San Francisco’s awesome.

[Darran]
I think I saw, I saw Cats in San Francisco when I was 12.

[Late Aster]
Okay.

[Darran]
On the big stage. The big, big production. Not the little, junky productions they do when they tour to smaller stages.

I just remembered that. I just remembered that. But, no, you mentioned restaurants, and I’m a huge foodie, and I always love it when a guest, they don’t know the next questions I’m gonna ask, at all, but one of my final questions I was gonna ask you, what would you say the best restaurant is around to go to in San Francisco that you’d like to go to for food?

If you had to pick, I know there’s a lot, but. So we’re not gonna narrow it down by, like, cuisine or anything like that? Cuisine genre?

Nope, nope. If I come to visit San Francisco, you gotta say, Daryl, you gotta go here. It could be an area, though, with a bunch of restaurants.

Oh, well, yeah. You should just come by where we live, and, yeah.

[Late Aster]
Yeah. Our favorite restaurants are all, boom, boom, boom.

[Darran]
What, go ahead. Okay, well, so I think if you’re gonna, if you want, like, a beer and pizza, you should go to Cellar Maker, which is a, they do Detroit-style pizza, and they make incredible beer. It’s just, it doesn’t make sense, actually, how good they are at everything, but that’s, I would say, I think that’s a crown pleaser, if that’s what you’re into.

I think the other place I would send people is this Palestinian place called Reem’s, which is, they’ve just got the best dips and pitas and falafel you can imagine. It’s amazing. So, those are my two hits.

And, Anni, anything on your list?

[Late Aster]
I mean, those are on mine, too. For, like, for our favorite, like, fancier place is Flour and Water, which is, they do, like, handmade pastas.

[Darran]
Okay. It’s really good. Flour and Water wasn’t featured in the noodle show, was it?

[Late Aster]
Maybe.

[Darran]
I would not be surprised if it was.

[Late Aster]
It’s kind of a big deal.

[Darran]
Yeah. Can you see them making the noodles in the back?

[Late Aster]
Yeah. Or either that, maybe, and I think their Instagram has, like, overhead views of them doing it.

[Darran]
I think so, too. I think I may have saw something on- It’s amazing. I saw one of the shows my friend watches.

She watches those cooking shows and stuff, too. And I was watching, like, how the noodle, I can’t remember. It’s something about noodles, and each person is talking about where they got their skills from in the noodles, and they opened up a restaurant.

In the back, they have this whole, like, glass box area where they prep everything. You can kind of watch this while you’re having dinner. Anyways.

Okay, I’m sold. I’ll be down there soon.

[Late Aster]
Cool.

[Darran]
Is there anything else you want to let our DJ Sessions fans know before we let you go?

[Late Aster]
I mean, check out the single, Ctrl-F Discipline, tomorrow. Check out the record, October 24th, our first debut record’s coming out, and we have another record coming out in June. So, if you aren’t into the lo-fi, you can hear a fully produced, Totally Other Direction coming from us in June.

[Darran]
Yay! I like follow-up interviews.

[Late Aster]
Yay! I love that.

[Darran]
Awesome. Where’s the best place for people to go to find out more information about all this stuff?

[Late Aster]
You can check out our Instagram, at Late Aster. We also love producing videos to accompany music, so YouTube is a great platform for seeing the visual content that we come up with. And you can find out more on our website, LateAster.com.

[Darran]
Late Aster on the show. Anni and Aaron from San Francisco coming in today for the DJ Sessions. Awesome.

Thank you both for being here. It was a pleasure having you. We are definitely going to stay in contact, follow up with you, and I’ll let you know when I’m down in the Bay Area, hopefully in the near future, because I’m hungry now.

I want to go eat lunch, and I want some noodles. I want some pizza. And maybe I’ll set aside from the beer, because since in the last few months, I put on 35 pounds sitting in this chair again.

So I got to lay off carbs, but I like good pizza. Maybe I’ll just walk up some of the hills around there, and then I’ll burn it all off, and that’ll be good enough for me. Awesome.

Well, thank you both for coming on the show today. It was a pleasure having you. Like I said, we’re going to definitely follow up with you in the future.

Congratulations on the release and the new album coming out. And remember, go to their website, lateaster.com, and find them on the socials, out there at YouTube and Instagram. On that note, don’t forget to go to our website, thedjsessions.com.

Find out all about the past episodes, exclusive mixes, interviews, music, social media, all that and more. We have over 700 news stories that get published every month to our site. Yes, 700.

Plus exclusive interviews like this, music releases. We have our VR nightclub. We have our mobile app and so much more at thedjsessions.com.

Check it out. Hi, I’m your host, Darran coming to you from the virtual studios in Seattle, Washington. That’s Anni and Aaron coming in from San Francisco for The DJ Sessions.

And remember, on The DJ Sessions, the music never stops.