A Travesty Prevented Bring Professional Approach to Dubstep
by Tim Wenger
After spending a few years working in the music industry, being able to tell the professionals from the amateurs becomes a pretty easy thing to do. For many, music is a hobby, their band is merely their escape from everyday life, and many stones from the garden of music business remain unturned.
Every once in a while, though, a group comes along that reeks of seriousness, oozes with professionalism. The business card enters your hand at the same time as the album, and instead of a whiskey and coke you find their empty hand reaching for yours.
In Denver’s dubstep market, A Travesty Prevented is one of the shining stars. “Oddly enough, I was in Iraq, and (Preston Denning) sent me a cd of stuff that he’d been working on,” says Travis Huyler. Huyler began working with Denning immediately upon his return from serving overseas.
“When he got back, we hit this thing full force,” says Preston Denning. “Ever since our release of our first album in September of 2013, we’ve just been hitting it hard playing shows and putting out content galore.”
The name A Travesty Prevented began as a play on the duo’s initials, T and P, but quickly grew into a deeper meaning that demanded more emotion than a just a couple of letters could express. “We decided, ‘What is a philosophy that we live by,’” says Huyler. “Well, music prevents travesties in life, prevents hardships. So we decided to name it A Travesty Prevented.”
Denning and Huyler hope to grow the name as more than just a band. They want to grow it into a brand and a slogan, promoting positive campaigns and actions. “We want to expand it into a movement with our fan base and our community,” says Huyler. “We’re doing a campaign now, ‘A Travesty Prevented for Sober Driving’. And there will be more with various other philosophies where music prevents travesties.”
“We’ve all been through trials and tribulations in our life,” says Denning. “One thing we always run to is music. It’s a pretty good philosophy to live by.”
The group dropped their new album on February 11, and is available at the major online retailers as well as ReverbNation.“We wanted to push for a more aggressive album,” says Huyler. “A lot of our influences like Datsic came out with albums that are just really aggressive. So we decided to make a campaign for a more aggressive, harder hitting bass line album.”
The title, aptly, plays a game of introspective footsie with album’s overall feel. “We titled it You Gone Soft as a contradiction to the fact,” says Huyler.
“We’re all about light and dark, and contrast, so we really wanted to go for that kind of a title,” says Preston Denning.
For their next record, the group will be collaborating with artists across genre lines. “For a long time, we really were preaching indepence,” says Denning. “We wanted to be independent, we wanted to do everything ourselves. But then we realized that any great journey needs a great amount of people, so we started bringing people in. Which then inspired the new album that will be coming out this year.”
They will be featuring collaborations with rap, metal, reggae, and other genres. They also hope to incorporate more live instrumentation into their shows. “That’s another thing that we want to move forward with in our live performances,” says Denning. “We’re sick and tired of the mentality that with djs and producers, all they do is hit play. What we want to start doing is bringing more live elements into our music. Having guitarists come up and rip while we’re performing. We’re going to be doing a lot of live midi triggering. Something not a lot of djs do.”
Denning and Huyler also take pride in creating all of their beats from scratch, instead of the wide-spread disease of sampling that makes up so much of the electronic and hip hop world. The sounds they create bridge the gap between pure dubstep and trance and dance. “We’re trying to be extremely versatile,” says Denning.
“We definitely want our fans to have an experience,” says Huyler. “We built a custom dj booth from the ground up. With the intent not only for the lighting effects but for the (overall) experience, to maintain that aesthetic where you get the visual and the auditory.”
As far as an overall message the group hopes to portray? “We want people to follow what they want to do in life,” says Huyler. “When I got out of the military, I thought I was going to be a doctor, because I was a Medic. And then we got into this, and we took it serious and took ourselves serious, and I realized that I can do exactly what I want to do no matter what, as long as I’m willing to go through the motions to do it. We want people in general to do that, as a whole.”
A Travesty Prevented is working with Herman’s Hideaway on a number of dates stretching from Spring into Summer, and are looking hopefully at some festival and larger-scale dates at venues such as Beta Nightclub and The Church Nightclub.
Online: atravestyprevented.com
Category: Buzzworthy2
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