Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Team Void’s discography includes “Gone with the Werewolves” (2010 EP), “Robot Killer” (2012 LP), the live “Dead In Person” (2013 LP), “Mexican Bus” (2015 LP) and “Cursed to Rock the Living” (2017 EP). All of Team Void’s music is available at the band’s Web site and teamvoid.bandcamp.com.
Lerma recently got on the telephone for a lengthy interview. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Q: Have you been working since the coronavirus shutdowns?
A: No, I haven’t, actually. I have four jobs and all of them have been shut down. It’s kind of crazy but I’ve done a lot of work on the house. I’ve been mister handyman. It’s usually hard to take time to do that stuff because I’m always working so it’s been kind of cool. The next thing I’m going to do is take up my carpet. I have some nice wood floors so that’s going to be a big thing. I’m trying to do a little bit at a time.
Q: Do you have experience with home repairs?
A: No, YouTube is my friend. I’ve always been an apartment guy so owning a house has been an experience. We’ve been here eight years now so there were some things that needed to be done. I did a lot of little things that weren’t very expensive and were easy to do.
Q: What have you been doing during the pandemic other than home updates and band business?
A: Not much beside home and band. I’ve been working on the group, which has been pretty cool. We developed a website during all of this. It’s teamvoidmusic.com and that’s been really cool because we’ve compiled all of the releases and videos we’ve done. We’re getting ready to add a blog to it. It’s kind of new but we do have a really nice merch page. We’ve been going with Redbubble and creating merchandise has been a lot of fun. We have COVID masks and we’ve been getting some sales on that.
Q: Does Redbubble produce these on-demand per order, or do you have to invest money in ordering the various items listed online in bulk from them?
A: We have invested in it so we have merch with us, but you can also get it printed on-demand. That has been great. Our shower curtain has been a pretty hot item. I did it for fun as a designer but people do like it, which is awesome because I never expected that. We were doing merch before because it’s fun, especially with our action hero thing. Comic book people love it. We’ve always had a hand-in-hand thing with comic book conventions, horror conventions and stuff so that’s been on our side.
Q: Did you have a lot of shows scheduled when the pandemic hit?
A: Yeah, we did. We were actually doing pretty well. We were in quite demand. It’s bumming us out right now because Halloween was our time and we’d be getting geared up for that. We had quite a few pretty steady gigs we’d done over five or six years now. It’s going to be weird this year.
Q: Yeah, I never imagined anything like this.
A: I know, especially for people that depend on other people. It’s crazy. Just my general work, I had several positions but I’ve always had something to fall back on with the music as far as generating money. Right now, bands are like, ‘Wow, what do we do? We can’t play here, we can’t play there. We can’t go here.’ It’s definitely a weird time.
Q: Have you been able to work on music during all of this?
A: Yeah, El and I have a studio in the attic. We’ve always been pretty self-contained so that’s been fun. We do have a couple of new things we’re anxious to put out. We’ve been working on some fun stuff. I learned from being in other bands that it’s just about how far you can stretch your imagination. You have the right to do anything you want to do. It’s real liberating. I was talking to someone and I was like, ‘I could probably have like five Team Voids out there if I wanted to with masks on playing the same songs.’ I probably won’t do that but it’s fun to think about and having fun is what it’s about. I always had comic book-horror thing in my background so I always enjoy being able to use that. Mystery is always good.
Artist info: teamvoidmusic.com.
Contact contributing arts and music writer Don Thrasher at donthrasher100@gmail.com.
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