Satisfact

1996-1999

Matthew Steinke – Guitar, Electronics, and Vocals
Josh Warren – Bass and Synthesizer
Chad States – Keyboards
Jeremy Green – Drums (first two records)
Dave Snider – Drums (last record)

We composed as a unit merging sections together that we all liked from hours of jamming. It was a kind of musical democracy that really seemed to work. We also wrote parts that formed a base for us to improvise electronic and feedback noise over which was a key component to our live shows. Once we had all the instrumentation fully hammered out, I could listen to our practice recordings on headphones and focus on writing the lyrics. On my long bus rides, I wrote the Satisfact songbook pulling lines from billboards, signage, electronics manuals, sci-fi pulp novels, and from the darkest corners of my un-medicated psyche.

We listened to popular and obscure punk and new wave like Mission to Burma, Eno, Wire, The Stranglers, Gang of Four, Life in General (Seattle), Kraftwerk, Devo, The Talking Heads, Sparks, Random Hold, and Joy Division. We were especially interested in the late 70s and early 80s transition period where punk and new wave overlapped and still sonically unpolished. As well like most bands from the Northwest, we were heavily influenced by our peers, improvised noise, Sonic Youth, and Fugazi.

Satisfact

There are several Youtube playlist with most of our releases. Track them down on vinyl if you can find a copy. There is extra stuff on those versions and it sounds way better.

Satisfact's Main Synth

If you ever wondered what the tones at the end of the Orange Album were, it was a recording of an EPROM data stream intended for loading the keyboard patch memory onto Chad’s Juno 60 synthesizer. It uses an audio player (originally cassette) to stream data like an old modem into a port on the back of the synth. The tones get fed into a decoder circuit which replenishes the backed up settings.

As our primary synth, it was often losing its settings right before a show, and sometimes the cassette version of the tones would get lost or take too long so we put it on our CD as a track. That way there would always be one around to quickly reload its memory from a portable CD player. Here is the link if you want to load the exact tones from our recordings onto your Juno 60.

 

Live at the Rock Candy 1998