Fasba Fpel released 100 albums in the year 2015, collaborated with over 100 different artists, self-produced CDs that encouraged custom artwork, are planning a 16 hour long jam and much more. Please watch this video to the end to learn the secrets, the history, and a little of the future of one of the world’s most ambitious bands, Fasba Fpel.
Caleb Johnson had been playing guitar since he was 10 years old and achieved small town success with his teenage hair metal band, Black Velvet with the Sharrette Brothers. He later played with other musicians and released a more eclectic EP in a trio called The Sticky Lips.
A few years later he reconnected with his bass playing friend Matt Aughey, who introduced him to Opeth, they were able to play together every day and soon wrote an album’s worth of material but struggled to find a drummer that could understand the time signature changes. They asked if I’d like to try playing drums for them because I was in the neighborhood, we knew each other and we shared many mutual friends some of whom I was in a psychedelic folk rock band with at the time. I told them that I am not a heavy metal drummer and that they should look elsewhere, but I still wanted to play with them just for the fun of it even it is only one time.
They told me they enjoyed my creativity and it was refreshing that I was able to keep up with all of the changes.
We began playing weekly and tried out a female vocalist before I started encouraging the other two that we could potentially work on our voices together and sing different sections even if we added tons of effect to our voices to make us sound decent.
After that, when the guys came over, I’d have new ways of challenging us. I’d say things like, “Okay, let’s all just improv for a while but make sure you guys sing at least a little.” My ideas for new ways for us to jam were always expanding and before long, I realized that Caleb and Matt no longer made an effort to rehearse their written material, and apparently they had gotten a new drummer that they were playing with. Suddenly I’m not sure if I was kicked out of a band or not? The band with the other drummer became known as Smudge and Caleb and Matt’s names in Fasba became Huck Smudge and Donny Smudge. My other band at the time was called Juan Wilde which is why I was credited as Sean Juan Wilde.
During this time, I had a Super Nintendo in my room and Caleb and Matt began playing Secret of Mana before or after our jam sessions. In the game, they each randomly chose letters when naming their characters. One was Fsba and the other Fpel. I, being a total idiot, but loving our improvisational expression, proposed joining them together as our band name since there would surely never be another like it, just like our music.
Matt’s brother Brian and some of our other friends would often join the jam sessions and early on at this point, when my friends came to play I said, “Okay guys, let’s perform for 40 minutes straight, but… try not to play music.”
We recorded the session with a single room mic, put a delay effect on it and thought it sounded so cool that we randomly decided to release it. I don’t know how much of our book concept we thought of that day, but we saw this release as a prologue to what was to come and named it such. We wrote on and burned up a book then took a picture with wreckage and garbage in the background, then digitally altered the image for our album cover. The album was released as “Prologue” on October 5th of 2013.
After this, all of our jams averaged in an album’s length, often with some sort of preparation ahead of time. When Brian Aughey joined us, we would plan a change every 10 to 15 minutes. We would basically rotate left to the next instrument and switch to a different modular scale.
One day while just hanging out and perhaps listening back to one of our recordings, we decided to do the absolutely insane mission of releasing an improv album every week.
Caleb and I still to this day very much enjoy big conversations where we see about 99% eye to eye on extremely absurd creative endeavors and our opinions on different aspects of music and the music industry. We had so many thoughts about what Fasba Fpel stood for that it’s hard for me to even recall all of it. We believed that music was often most beautiful or interesting when it came from natural spontaneous expressions. We believed music should be unpredictable and constantly progress. We feel that when musicians collide, you can achieve sounds that could have never been written, we believed that everything can be inspirational to someone and that sharing everything you do as a musician is a beautiful thing and that sometimes artists that only show you their perfections can become boring. Imperfection is often wonderful in it’s own way and when musicians are all in their own worlds, the sound of the music can be even more interesting when the instruments aren’t playing traditional roles with each other. Maybe someone is in a heavy metal mindset while another is in a psychedelic mindset and together with that other guy who is lost in a different tempo and time signature, we have a sound never heard before that can be totally inspiring to the right set of ears. We also thought it would be cool to have a discography that could be used like a non-stop playlist of constantly changing music.
Anyway, we were ridiculous and decided that we would record an album on Sunday then release it the following weekend before recording again. We decided that since it was going to be difficult to come up with track titles each week that it would be really interesting if we told a never ending story through them. So we started writing about a wizard character in a sci-fi setting and would expand upon it every month or so to give us sentences that broke up and became some very crazy track titles along with a chapter number specific to each “Book.”
This became our first of many album series. “The Book Series” which started in May of 2014. The first couple of album titles referenced how bizarre our name was and many of the future titles are some type of inside joke, often based on the session in some way.
At this time, it was still just the three of us, trying to stay as varied as possible each week while going through our typical vibes that were on a strange spectrum that ranged between heavy metal and avant-garde psychedelia all of which was played with a type of jazz mindset.
We recorded our sessions with portable microphones in front of amplifiers then I would mix them. After a couple of months of this, it was clear that we were going to need to start incorporating more musicians in order to keep things interesting. But before I move to the next era, I want to mention my favorite album from the beginning of the book series, “Book VII: Reminded of the West Under Water” in which we attempted to be a horror soundtrack inspired doom metal band.
Beginning with Book 9, we attempted to start having a guest star every week, starting slow with some of our friends like Folk Hogan banjoist Kameron Anton on “Book X: Seimmud.” Guests were encouraged to experiment and branch out and Caleb and I would often force people out of their comfort zones. We also often offered the guest the opportunity to provide the album title and artwork or to pass that duty on to a loved one and due to that, dozens of artists contributed fantastic album covers.
It was before “Book 13” that my dear friend Travis Cross called me to tell me he had found a cheap deal on a sweet mixing board that we named Gleeoo. Scruffy as we call him, joined the project as producer and sound engineer and eventually Caleb began mastering the albums.
“Book 13: Bow to Gleeoo” featured The Rose Phantom on theremin, keyboards and drums. He brought masks with him and his friend Purgatory Pete filmed the session. After that, I would invite one or two camera operators to each recording and eventually had a light board and light board operator. Some of the characters that would come and go included Line Master, Violet, Chovy, Na Na Na Na LightMan, Joel Condit and Jersey. These last two and others helped do some face paint for the group but it was “Book 28: Blood Smoothie” featuring the excellent bassist, Eric Blood when we met the incredibly talented Jez Roberts who joined the project as a face painter on most weeks and unfortunately it took us months to realize how awesome of a singer she is.
Leading up to that time, we had some really excellent albums with some superb guest stars including Rylee McDonald of Advent Horizon and Beach Death, Chris Hanna of The Swinging Lights, Sherrod Parkhouse of Sherrod and the Blues Day Riders, Craig Waddel of Sturgeon General, Jeddie Duffey of Opal Hill Drive and more, with two of the other albums in this time period being a couple of my favorites.
“Book 29” featured a dear friend of mine Andrew Hopkins. He performed in the band Melodramus that I supported so strongly for so many years that I eventually became their manager for a time. Unfortunately, Andrew died from a drug overdose from his prescriptions and is very missed. I still consider him to be on of my top 10 favorite drummers of all time and I really appreciate all the information he gave me over the years. I love you Andrew.
“Book XXX” We met John Farmer who later gave me a radio show on his platform AMR, in which I would interview my guest stars about their experience jamming with Fasba, play some of the guest’s music and then play the latest Fasba album. The station has since dialed back to it’s original focus and is found at UtahMusicRadio.com
A couple of weeks later we met author and musician Craig Nybo who came over and had such a blast performing with us that when his band came to his studio for practice that night, he challenged them to record and release an album length jam that they soon posted online as “Freestyle Gargoyles.” In April of 2015, they released a second album in the series which they filmed and posted to YouTube. It featured 4 guest authors reading short stories with a conductor leading the band. This has since become an occasional Halloween occurrence with a greater number of authors and longer sessions.
After over 30 weekly jams, the year of 2014 had almost come to an end and we had been discussing how crazy it would be if we could release 100 albums in the course of 2015 along and thought maybe we could get some kind of world record or notice for such achievement. Spoiler alert, no body cared.
The recording session for each “Book” included a “test jam” at the beginning to ensure all of the equipment and levels were decent before the full jam, these shorter jams would be compiled as “The Dark Diary” series. Because the Chapter titles for the “Book” series told the story of our protagonist, we decided to use the “Dark Diary” as the writings of his antagonist with largely the same qualities as the Wizard but on the other spectrum of light and dark.
The album covers for the first 16 albums in this series combine together to make one piece of art that the three of us along with Jersey had created. [There is a 17th Dark Diary ready for release except that it doesn’t have a cover.]
We used this same tactic for what we called the “Prequel” series. Not to be confused with our debut album, “Prologue”
January 1st of 2015’s release was the first of the “Jamunity” series where we invited some of our favorite guest stars back to form a super group. I feel like these are really great albums for people who like more accessible music as they don’t get quite as ridiculous as Caleb and I like to get, but the musicians are top notch and do a great job playing together. I’ll never forget some of these meetings especially when the frontman of the band Sturgeon General, Craig Waddell expressed his excitement to meet and jam with Dan Nelson as he had apparently been inspired by the other ska saxophonist. The excellent guitarist Nick Johnson plays on “Jamunity 4,” an album that had some great improvised lyrics and vocals by a kind man named Jon Turner who unfortunately left us this time last year.
As we moved into 2015, we had tons of excellent jams and were in a sense branching out into different genre territory. We had an even heavier metal album when Palmer of Jesuz Rides a Rikshaw came over, Then we got super jazzy with Kendrick Zane, played some blues rock with Balls Capone, became a gypsy band with members of Folk Hogan and Orphan’s Cabaret, and tapped into our electro pop side with Allison Martin.
During all of this, Scruffy, Caleb and I had created Ocean Eyes Records which did some recordings and releases for some other groups, but also had some physical productions as well including CD duplication services. When it came to Fasba CDs, we printed the album title in a very light gray font onto solid white CDs along with a message encouraging you to create your own artwork.
Most Fasba CDs included a sticker of the album’s cover, then the CD sat in an inner sleeve with more information, and a picture of the album’s crew and lineup. We had also tie-dyed shirts and then screen printed logos afterward.
Matt is an awesome dude, a great bassist and contributed a ton of art, ideas and good times to this project but his mindset wasn’t quite where Caleb and I were and after the first few months of 2015, he expressed his desire to leave the project, when he was ready, we scheduled an album that featured him as the guest star and cover artist for an album we called, “Book 50: Farewell Donny” as a tribute to all he had done.
With our bassist gone, we had a new dynamic that allowed for myself to play bass whenever we had a drummer over and we would often request the assistance of Geed or Eric Blood, especially when it came to the albums that featured rappers like Rytuall, Sin, and Gryzzlee Beats. We jammed with some greek instruments, and some great guests like Shane Provstgaard, Steve Auerbach, Hasen Cone and Bob Smith before a guy named Dick Grant came over with his 6 string bass and deck of tarot cards. After the test jam and right before beginning the recording of “Book 59,” he laid out a few cards and said, “This is our inspiration” or something like that. Oddly, this was the first time that I attempted to sing an improvised concept album. I still really dig this album a lot, but I probably prefer “Book 65: Funky Space Queen” where I sang about all the cats that had been in and out of my mom’s house over the previous several years. Though I try not to make it obvious that I’m singing about cats as I sing about personality traits and territory wars.
Of course life is unpredictable and there was more than one occasion when the guest didn’t end up showing up and in one of these situations, and created an extremely psychedelic album where I tell a detailed story of a planet mentioned in our title tracks. We soon followed this album with a prequel that also featured Miles Sharette helping us with our avant-garde landscapes and after that, Caleb and I concluded the trilogy with “Book 74: Massacre of Khomodeyaama.” For my own personal listening, I created a 2 hour track that joined all three albums together and I enjoyed it so much, I planned to re-package it as a triple album with artwork telling the story in comic book style but I haven’t executed this yet and am interested in finding a visual artist to work with.
Around this time we finished recording our first “studio album.” It was a strange experiment with layers of music that don’t necessarily go together and some of our favorite singers and soloists performing over it.
Some of that experiment in a sense, was to see if people would listen to and enjoy such a thing, and not one person told me they liked that album, so that says a lot, but I still feel there needs to be more data in the study. I am not in need of compliments at all and I would have enjoyed hearing any criticism. That being said however, if I ever do get too down about the reception to this project, I remind myself of the best compliment the project ever received. It was a tweet that we weren’t even tagged in but I found it one day when searching the band’s name. It simply said, “I could listen to Fasba Fpel for hours,” and if that isn’t a superb compliment that can keep an artist going, I don’t know what is. That tweet came from Sean Magee, a mastering engineer at Abbey Road that has gotten to fiddle with the original tapes that my heroes recorded. I asked him if he’d be interested in sending us a track that we would use in one of the other “Studio albums” that we had in the works but unfortunately, weren’t completed and we haven’t released some incredible recordings by Shane Provstgaard, Gryzzlee Beats, Alan Greenall and more. Sorry guys, we still have the tracks I believe and will hopefully get to it one day.
To celebrate the release of the album and have a big birthday party, we decided to make our first public appearance. We had been booked at The Woodshed but they later told us they double-booked with a touring act and that we couldn’t perform. We moved the show to our studio and allowed several people to come and go from the stage. The performance was recorded and released as “Shuck the Woodfed.”
We topped off the year with a series of 9 drone albums created through mostly minimalist playing and altering the playback speed and other effects. I personally, don’t listen to these albums but I could see them being great for calming atmospheres and I know that Caleb enjoys them quite a bit.
2015 came to an end and we accomplished our ridiculous endeavor and I finally moved out of my mom’s house to go live with my girlfriend at the time. That’s right, all of this was at my mom’s house and she would allow Scruffy to come and go at any time of day whether I was in state or not. So, when it comes down to it, none of this could have happened if it weren’t for my mom putting up with. So thank you Mom! I love you and we all appreciate you! Make sure to thank my mom in the comments!
We attempted to continue a studio in my new location and also considered keeping the studio at my mom’s house. But it seemed the era was at an end, I had become exhausted by all the work I had put into our project and was ready to try different things in life for a time to give myself new inspirations to draw on when ready to return to music.
When Caleb and I get together, we often talk about how we should be finding a venue that will allow us to live stream and record a monthly concert for a form of Fasba revival. We also often talk about re-branding as simply Fasba and in 2022, Caleb remixed and rereleased our album that features legendary composer and guitarist Tom Hopkins. We had intended to do this monthly, but life catches up to you and Caleb learned how to code and completed his first Caleb Johnson Custom guitar. I’m super excited for the 5 string bass he is making me.
The wheels are in motion for the new challenge we’ve decided to do. Caleb and I are going to be joined by the guests of our album “Book 35: String Theories,” Miles and Markus Sharette as we attempt to jam for a full 16 hours. We will all start and end together but there will be moments when we must fade ourselves out to take small breaks then re-enter the jam with a different instrument. We plan to livestream the event in June and are still working out the kinks but I will include links below to where the stream then later the recording can be found.
(Update: An unfortunate loss forced us to postpone)
I feel like I talked about a ton of stuff but obviously there is still much more that I didn’t get around to talking about including many talented people. If I didn’t mention you specifically in this video, please know that my script simply didn’t call for it but that we appreciate what you contributed and if you’re interested in working with us again just shoot me a message. I also have had many ideas for ways to collaborate with more people from around the planet, not specifically for this project, if you’d like to learn more, please shoot me an email at SeansMusicHunt@gmail.com
Sean's Music Hunt 
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