Jersey guys Tash Even & Kyle are back at it for a new night of jams at Gaslight in Atlantic Highlands with fellow Garden Staters Pepperwine this Saturday, October 19.
When I talked to the guys of Tash Even & Kyle over video call, they were gearing up for a gig at Twin Lights Brewing in Tinton Falls that weekend. Fresh off their record release party for Oxygen or Ham – a gameshow concept album featuring satirical segments and shimmering grooves such as “Eggabowle,” the aptly named single “Pizza Equity,” and a high energy host named Sergei Geufinov (say it out loud) – at the same venue earlier this year, the experimental instrumental trio was jazzed about jamming again at the Jersey Shore.
“It’s super chill. It’s fun. [They] put together a really nice space. It sounds great in there and just seems like a fitting venue for us,” said Steve “Even” Cooperstein (Drums).
With longtime friends Matthew “Tash” Smith (Bass/Keys/Percussion) and John “Kyle” Hendriksen (Guitar), they’re back at it on Saturday, October 19, for a new night of music at Gaslight in Atlantic Highlands – a hop and a skip from their hometown of Long Branch, and right down the street from the iconic Stone Pony and the Asbury Park Convention Center. The trio will be joined by fellow Jerseyans, the groove quartet Pepperwine.
“We go way back with them and are good friends, so we like to set up shows together when possible,” said Hendriksen.
And you heard it here first: Tash Even & Kyle (the name of which recalls Crosby Stills & Nash; no relation), TEK for short, is already getting ready to release a new album, another concept: Sergei Workday, a soundtrack to a regular nine-to-givenwork day, from waking up to going home. (You can expect Sergei Workday on the TEK Bandcamp later this year.)
So when we did jump on for this – from different places, including Update New York – the members of the trio, as busy as they’ve been with new album tracking, scheduling shows, and day jobs (“real life,” as one of them called it), gave us the exclusive on exactly who Sergei Geufinov is, why Oxygen or Ham, and what’s on the horizon for live tour – all finishing each other’s sentences the entire way. Check it out!
Matt Smith: I’m Matt Smith for TEK. I play bass, keyboard, and percussion. I’m a musician and I play all around different bands and just play and teach and do as much as I can, so, it’s all good!
Kyle Hendricksen: I am Kyle. I’m the guitar player. I’m the only one without like a real nickname, cause Matt is “Tash” – that’s his nickname, that’s the “T.”
MS: Right.
KH: And then, uh, you know, Steve is “Even.” I guess it’s kind of a nickname. I mean, my real name is John, but I’m Kyle. I don’t think anyone calls me John. So I think that’s how we came up with a nickname for me but…
So did the nicknames come before the brand or…?
KH: There he is! Stevie!
Steven Cooperstein: Hi! I’m Steve Cooperstein. I play drums in Tash Even and Kyle. And right now I’m up in Lake George working, doing custom built-ins. All kinds of cool stuff [for home renovations].
So I was just asking, did your nicknames come for sake of the band or were they nicknames that you had that fit the band? Where did the band name come from?
MS: My nickname, Tash, is a stupid inside joke from years ago, and if I explained it, it would just be like kind of like, “Alright…” you know? So that’s a nickname that I came up with years ago, with friends of mine and Steve. His name’s Even cause he’s “Even Steven.” He seems to be the most keeled person. To get Steve upset about something, it really has to get to a certain point, so that’s not just a nickname. It’s definitely a way that he has, this energy…
KH/MS [at the same time]: It’s a way of life.
MS: For sure. ‘The Even Way.’ And I don’t want to jump ahead or anything, but how we started the band – me and Steve, we played in bands going back through high school and always played together over the years. By the time we were in our early twenties, it was like 2011 and 2012 and we started jamming together and just kind of improvising. I was just on bass and he was on drums and I had a little keyboard and we were just kind of jamming and didn’t really write anything. We just experimented and kind of thought we could make something with nothing, you know? Just kind of improvise. Then a couple of years went by and we were kind of doing it more often, and Steve suggested we call Kyle. We’ve known Kyle for our whole lives. Actually, all three of us went to school together, all the way through middle school and high school, so we’d known each other for years, but we never played music with Kyle before. So, the first day he came over, it wasn’t anything organized. It was just, “Come over, let’s show you what we do and see what you can incorporate and we’ll all kind of have this improvisational dialogue happening.” It wasn’t perfect by any sense, but you could feel, like, an energy. There was something there that we could kind of hone in on and get together. When he came to play with us, it was like, “Why don’t we just keep this going?” Then we just kept going and now over 11 years later we’re still playing somehow.
SC: We brought some recordings over to Kyle’s and he was like, “Alright, alright, I’ll come jam with you guys.”
KH: Yeah, they were like metalheads in school. So I was like, “I don’t know, guys, like… I don’t know if I’m gonna be into this.”
SC: [Laughs] Yeah, you went through the metal series.
KH: Yeah, and then they showed me recordings and I was like, “Oh, this is awesome. Let’s do it.”
The line is very thin [between jam and metal] I think. Now, you’ve been in a band for a long time. What were you recording on and what were the systems that you were playing on the computer back then?
KH: Oh, yeah. I mean, we were using Audacity and Garage Band. We just recorded everything with one mic in the middle of the room and played it live. We have pretty much every practice we’ve ever had recorded and archived for 11 years, so they’re not like perfect recordings by any means, but it was something to reference when we were coming up with new ideas. It’s really just creative sessions, you know?
Why did you initially think it’d be a good idea to record every practice to listen back to and get creative with? What was the impulse to be diligent about recording your music so early on?
KH: I guess, mostly, it was that there was never a direction that we were heading in. The focus has always just been music and nothing else came before that. Like, we never like sat down like, “Alright, we’re gonna play this song this way.” Matt’s never been like, “Alright! Here’s a finished song! Let’s play it.” It’s always been more like, “Alright, Steve – pick a key.” Steve’s a drummer and he’ll just pick a random letter, and sometimes it’s not a letter that we can use [Laughs], but he’ll be like “G!” and we’re all, “Alright, let’s play G!” We just go with it. Sometimes it goes nowhere, and sometimes, like 40 minutes later, we put our instruments down and are just like, “That was awesome. Let’s make that a song.” That is how it’s been from the beginning, so being able to go back to it and listen has really contributed to all the music we have now.
Excellent. So I’ll jump forward a little bit now. Congrats on the new concept album Oxygen or Ham. First of all, why the concept album? The art’s really cool… who did you work with on putting it together, and how?
MS: So one night we’re just hanging out, you know, having fun, and our friend Rob [McCabe] (who plays saxophone with us and is playing on the [Twin Lights] gig with us this Saturday – we’re a trio but he’s always is our number one guy we call to to play with us) brought over a hoagie… dip. It’s like a sub, you know, ham, salami and all the stuff chopped up and everything.
KH: He’s a Philly guy.
MS: Right. It’s like a Philly thing. It’s called hoagie dip. He brought it over and we ate it for a while and we let it sit out for a while. Like not on purpose – if we were hanging out, we let it sit. So then Kyle and I were up in the kitchen and we’re looking at it, and I was just like, “You want some room temperature ham?” And he’s like, “Oh, God,” and it was like, “Yeah, man. It’s like you can’t tell if you’re breathing oxygen or eating ham. Are you eating room temperature ham? Are you breathing oxygen? It’s so warm you can’t tell.” Then it just went into this whole thing like – “Kyle, what was that show? Is It Cake? Or something?”
KH: It was like The Masked Singer, one of those commercials.
MS: Yeah, and it was like “What if it was a game show?” Then we were just riffing back and forth with this operative joke and we were crying by the end of the time we were talking about it. And then we forgot about it. It was just kind of an inside joke and then it just became like, “Why don’t we just write a song? Oxygen or Ham – like a theme song.” Then Kyle had the idea of just making it the whole album, like making three segments in between. “Let’s just make the whole album the game show.” And I was like, “I love it, so let’s just do that.” That’s how we came to it, and just to make a note, the announcer in the recording (Sergei Geufinov is his name) is our good friend Stan [Yates] who is one of our best brothers and one of the biggest supporters of the band. He did us the honor of doing the voice for us on the record. You know, he was very nervous at first. Once he did a couple of takes, he got his footing and he really enjoyed it, so shoutout to Stan for killing it on our album.
SC: Yeah, he did a really good job.
Absolutely sounded great. What a great name for a voice person.
MS: That came from a disgraced Russian hockey player who brought great shame to his country by being so bad at hockey that his name is Sergei Geufinov, and he had to find other job. So he’s a game show host for the public broadcast network, like a PBS game show…
KH: Completely fictional character.
A lot of story, but comes through the music. Very cool. How many shows have you played the album at?
SC: One so far.
KH: Yeah, straight through.
MS: To support the album? Yeah, one show so far. And we played the album from front to back at the release show at [Twin Lights].
Front to back. So not yet interspersed with other songs. It’s like the experience. It’s the Oxygen or Ham experience.
MS: Well, at concerts coming up we’re gonna mix the songs in, but that being the debut of the release of the album, we wanted to play it in its entirety so everyone could get a full idea of what it sounded like as a full piece doing it front to back at the show.
KH: [For this Saturday’s show] we’re not going to repeat any songs from the release show. We’re going to play a whole separate group of songs and a few covers, but try to mix it up a little bit.
SC: A lot of our older stuff, too.
That brings me a question that goes backward and forward: I had an opportunity to interview Kyle when he was in The Union in 2016, and you were a band long before that. From following you guys, it seemed that at one point that was a bit of a hiatus. I’m wondering, from the beginning to the present day of the band, what’s the nutshell history to explain that?
SC: Oh, yeah, we were at a little bit of a hiatus, but we never stopped playing. I mean, we were still – we never stopped. We always kept our TEK Thursdays, as we call it.
MS: And always writing, always recording new ideas. That’s why it came out on the other side with all this fresh new music, because we went away and just kind of hunkered down and just played for a few years without really playing gigs and then came out the other side with some fresh stuff. I feel we are tighter as a band than we ever were before.
SC: Yeah.
Awesome. We’re all people, right? Life is life. You gotta roll with it.
KH: Yeah.
MS: Oh, absolutely. And this is what we call this our family band. This is a brotherhood. It’s beyond like just three guys creating a band together. Music is what brought us all together, but the bond we have is stronger than anything. Music is just the way we can be together, and it’s just our love for each other; it’s really in our friendship.
SC: 100%, man.
Yeah, I hear you describing that kind of synergy, friendship – you’re not talking to each other while you’re playing, so you kind of have to, if you’re improvising, listen to each other in a different way. Years of knowing each other must supports that. Besides the saxophonist, do you have any other guest stars that you bring into the fold? For your live acts or just jamming?
SC: Stan is our new voice guy.
KH: Yeah, but he won’t do it live. If you come see us, he’ll be on a couch somewhere nearby and he’ll be watching, but he won’t do the voice live. But you can’t miss him, he’s six-foot-seven. You can’t miss him. It’s like crazy. No, though – just Rob. Rob’s played with us forever. He used to play The Stone Pony with us all the time when we were in Asbury a lot. And he was part of the band for a while. As far as like writing and everything, we write everything as a trio and then bring Rob in, like, “This is what you are doing, work it out.” So we’re excited to bring him back. It’s been a while since… I think we haven’t played a show with him since 2018.
Yeah, brass does a lot. Looking forward to seeing that. Also, maybe Stan can be like SIA and stand with this back to the audience live sometime. Would you play the recording of it live?
KH: Yeah! At the release show, we played the recordings and it was kind of funny because you had to sit there and listen to the recordings while he’s in the room, but he had approved of that before we put them on. Maybe we can get him behind a curtain one day.
MS: A little Wizard of Oz, kind of.
SC: Yeah!
That would definitely add an element to it. So you’ll be going back to Twin Lakes Brewing this Saturday. The album release show was there and I understand that you are working on a residency with a couple of shows in there already. What’s it like playing there? What’s the relationship?
SC: It’s super chill. It’s fun. It’s… my roommate is actually the owner of the brewery and he put together a really nice space. It sounds great in there and just seems like a fitting venue for us.
KH: Yeah, once they lifted the event mandates for breweries in New Jersey, they were able to expand and start doing more music, so he reached out to Steve was like, you know, “You guys want to do something?” We were working on the album anyway, so it kind of worked out. We were like, “Alright, let’s give it a shot. You know, we can do our thing. People can come. It’ll be a free show. Can’t beat it.” Then we had so much fun there. Everyone came and we were like, “We gotta do this again,” so we’re excited to get back there.
What can people expect from TEK show?
MS: Really, anything. We have a philosophy that any and everything and anything is fair game when we write music. We don’t commit to one style, we don’t commit to one, like, flavor or texture or anything like that. The music can just go anywhere. When you come to a TEK show you’re going to get something that you probably never really heard before, and a lot of sound coming from three people, too, a lot of times. With bigger bands, obviously it’s easier to achieve a large, dense sound, and I think that’s really our goal: to create an atmosphere that everyone can really get sucked into and kind of get lost in. That’s kind of what we do.
KH: We try to do a “no rules” thing when we play live. We could just turn to each other in the middle of a jam and be like, “Alright, let’s go to this,” and then it’s something that we didn’t rehearse or anything like that, so, yeah, if we’re feeling that we’re just going to do it, we’ll do it.
MS: It’s all about having your ears open at all times; like you have to have big antennas and just be able to pick up on different sounds. If one person is kind of leading something and they add something, you want to be complementary towards it. You don’t want to, like, battle it. You know it’s about moving with each other and not fighting each other, so if you feel a strong pull within the music that is going in a certain direction, we all gravitate to that area, and that can happen. We have no idea when or what will happen, but it will happen, at some point.
Do you play to the audience in the same way? Like the way you listen to each other, you might listen to the room. What’s that process like?
KH: I don’t know if that’s something that we necessarily do. I can certainly say for Rob the sax player, he feeds into that. I’ll never forget one time we were playing this one show at The Stone Pony years ago. We were playing with the Kung Fu, we are the opener for them, and Rob was playing sax and it was a sold out show. It was crowded. It was crazy. We played right before them and Rob… I’ve never seen him play the way he did that night. He was just feeding off of it, going nuts, whereas I think the three of us, we kind of just like stay in our own worlds when we’re playing and try not to get distracted. Rob, you know… he can let it rip. We just kind of sat back and let it happen.
MS: When we’re playing, sometimes, you almost lose yourself within it, especially when it gets really within… when you get within a set and you’re playing a lot of improvisation… like once you’re in it, you kind of get lost. I like to hope that those listeners kind of feel that way, too; that they don’t have to overthink about it or think about too much, you know, crowd interaction, especially being an instrumental trio. Being with a band that sings at lot, people are used to hearing the voice, that person’s used to speaking and having crowd interaction, but it’s instrumental and it’s more about sounds we’re creating. With that said, there’s not much crowd interaction, but it doesn’t mean we’re ignoring them. We just want them to come along with us and what we’re doing, and we invite them to come with us.
Speaking of working on things together, what’s going on with the new album? You just released Oxygen or Ham.
SC: We’re working on a lot of songs that we’ve had in our back pocket for a long time – even pre- COVID – and we’re just ready to record it. I’m really excited about this one. I don’t know – I’m a man of few words!
MS: It’s another concept album, we can tell you that. It’s another concept album, and pretty much every album’s gonna be a concept album. We can’t help ourselves to write stories and go on adventures. And it going to be starring Sergei Geufinov. He’s the main character, once again.
What studio do you use?
KH: Kyle’s basement.
MS: Tremendous job.
KH: Yeah, so basically when you were talking about hiatus before, I mean, really, we were down here playing the whole time. And, you know, we’re all busy with real life, I guess. Like, careers. Matt’s teaching a lot, but l we were just pretty much down here playing the whole time. And, while we were doing that, we built a studio, got it all set up, and so we do all of our recording here now. All of everything you hear on the last album we did down here. It’s a little oasis down here.
I have one last question. It’s fun one. What is the sandwich order? And it can be hot and/or cold.
KH: Sandwich! Is this like breakfast or lunch?
Hot and cold.
KH: All right.
Any sandwich is good at any time, in my opinion.
SC: Pork roll, man.
MS: Pork roll, egg, and cheese, Steve?
KH: Oh, yeah!! He’s going pork roll. Ok, Matt, what do you got?
MS: I’m going to say… do you count a BLT as a cold sandwich? If so, BLT is my cold. I just had a really good lobster roll yesterday – a hot lobster roll. It was delicious, so I’m going to say lobster roll because that one yesterday was so good.
KH: Alright, hot’s gotta be chicken parm. Cold, I like a good chicken salad – kind of nice.
MS: Quality question. Steve, you need a cold one, dude. You’re not getting off that easy.
SC: Good roast beef sandwich.
KH: Just roast beef?
SC: Roast beef with lettuce, tomato, onion, man, and American cheese.
Oh, it’s cold. Yeah.
MS: There you go, ok.
SC: Little mayo.
LISTEN TO OXYGEN OR HAM HERE & KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR SERGEI WORKDAY, THE UPCOMING ALBUM FROM THIS INSTRUMENTAL TRIO. GET TICKETS TO THIS WEEKEND’S SHOW IN ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS, & FIND NEWS, UPDATES, & MORE BY CLICKING HERE.
