Grannie Annie Records: Press

Electronica Duo Join Forces to FIGHT LIKE ANIMALS

 

Two different guys with two different styles have joined forces to form the experimental/electronica duo Fight Like Animals.

Aventura's Steve Vaynshtok and Davie's Brett Flaherty began meshing their talents earlier this year to create a raw, genre-bending wall of sound. Their debut CD, "Times of Violence," is due to drop in October.

The pair both play guitars, with Vaynshtok also on synthesizer. Their instruments, along with bass and keyboards, are blended with an unusual array of beats. Vaynshtok brings the ambient, erratic vibes. Flaherty, a professional producer, supplies the rock 'n' roll edge.

"Brett's the cake, I'm the icing," said Vaynshtok, a public relations major at Florida International University's Biscayne Bay campus in North Miami. "We do weird things, like using tubas, strings, tribal drums, hand claps and finger snaps. It adds depth."

Vaynshtok started Fight Like Animals with another musician, Vlad Rychko, in June 2009. When Rychko left to pursue other projects, Flaherty stepped in to fill the void.

"We want to bring people with different tastes together," Vaynshtok said. "Our music sounds like nothing else. We want people to listen and feel how much we love making it."

The music brings out the inner beast, too. Vaynshtok's inspiration for the band's name came from a painting that depicted two men wearing tiger and rabbit heads, battling each other in a windowless room.

"Our name conveys the raw state of the world," Vaynshtok said. "Deep down, we're all animals and we have our animal instincts."

FIGHT LIKE ANIMALS!

 

Fight Like Animals wants to make sure that all consumers of its music are well fed and having fun. Named after an inspirational yet graphic painting of two animals fighting for their lives, this act is clawing its way to the forefront of the Miami music scene. Things were jumpstarted for FLA as they quickly earned a record deal with Granny Annie Records just mere months after finishing their first few songs, along with an endorsement deal from Gibson. The duo consisting of the talented Brett Flaherty and the mysterious and creative Rostislav  “Steve” Vaynshtok.

Spooky, soothing and exotic all at the same time, Steve’s music feeds off of the sweet energy that Miami audiences can bring, and he easily admits that the city has had a profound impact on his sound. He is also big on music coming out of San Diego right now, along with older sounds like Frank Zappa and Black Sabbath and even Jamaican reggae and dancehall, including Marley and Capleton.

Mastering syncopation techniques to make music a dynamic experience for the listener, his creations represent a power struggle often between rhythm and strong leading sounds. “I feel like every song is something special and they’re so engrossing for me to play, I just hope people can feel the song, crawl inside it, stand up and just look around at this temple I’ve built them,” he said.

Spouting self proclaimed hippie ideals, Steve wants to use his music to generate not only new ways of thinking but also financial resources to fund charities and organizations around the world dedicated to alleviating pressing causes including civil, human and animal rights

Grannie Annie and Fight Like Animals: fighting for musical integrity

Posted October 21, 2009 at 10:58 pm

By Andrea Concepcion // Contributing News Writer

 

Sticky notes hang on a wall. CDs are piled up on the floor. Press releases and legal work lay on a desk. The rest of the space consists of a bedroom, living room and kitchen. This small apartment in Coconut Grove accommodates an independent record label. This is Grannie Annie Records.

William Alton, 25, a manager at a Borders bookstore always wanted to start a record label but never thought it could happen.  He tried researching but found the effort ridiculous.

Not until meeting local duo Fight Like Animals did he consider pushing forward. Now, his burgeoning label is centered on the symbiotic relationship with its sole band.

“I don’t want to say it [was] fate or coincidence,” Alton said. “But it [did] have written ‘right place at right time’ all over it.”

Fight Like Animals is a two-member instrumental rock band based in Miami. Rostislav Vaynshtok, 19, and Volodymyr Rychko, 17, or Steve and Vlad as they prefer to be called, are both from Ukraine. They have lived in the United States since childhood.

Three or four months ago, Alton met Vaynshtok at Borders. Alton was skeptical as they started talking about Vaynshtok’s band.

Alton joked, saying “your music probably sucks.”

He realized the band’s potential when Vaynshtok sent him a video of Fight Like Animals performing live. The duo has a unique, synthesized-rock sound that captivated Alton.

“If Fight Like Animals was a dinosaur, we were an electric pterodactyl,” Vaynshtok said. “We were a major screeching pile of electronica, a pure independent instrumental symphony.”

The video of the band and their music were Alton’s big indications to establish the label. Alton thought about a few names before finally deciding on Grannie Annie, named after his grandmother, the matriarch of his family. After going corporate, he wrote up a contract for Fight Like Animals.

“Will gave us the greatest recording contract in history, fifty-fifty,” Vaynshtok said.

Aware of how high the stakes were when delving into this business, Alton still decided to put all his savings into the band.

“If I don’t do well for the band, then the label [would be] done,” he said. “I’m not going to put more effort in anyone than them.”

The band members have two different views on what they want to do on the label. Vaynshtok is focused on marketing the band and making connections while Rychko said he just likes to make the songs.

“Playing just [gives] me a lot of satisfaction,” Rychko said.

Just as many larger record labels target specific genres, Grannie Annie Records and Fight Like Animals aim to bring musical variety to a transforming industry. They hope to bring integrity and passion to music since both need each other to thrive.

Vaynshtok summed up their relationship, “We got the wheels, but Will has got the car.”

Fight Like Friends
Two Ukrainian Musicians Could Seriously Take the Music Industry by not Taking it Seriously At All

By David Tanner

A couple of hilarious Ukrainians that are sure to bludgeon your skull with electro-rock from the grave, Fight Like Animals’ Steve (Rostislav Vaynshtok) and Vlad (Volodymyr Rychko) are bloopers-reel fun from the onset.

It’s hard not to cheese out after taking in their video tracks on the Myspace of days yore (that place that became Facebook). But musically, at least, it’s what musicians all tried to do back in the day: take an electro track that pops and write bitchin riffs that keep them coming back for more. The tracks in these kid’s souls are the head nodding purity of youth.

Unfortunately, the guys are teases. They recently took down their old tracks and the bloopers reel. Seriously.

But at an in-store Hot Topic gig last week at Aventura Mall, the two merry-makers had the place packed. Surrounded by faux-Goth gear Fight Like Animals’ die-hard fans gaped on as Rychko ran the beat through a PSP. During a mid-track guitar trade, Rychko grabbed the Epiphone to lay into the rhythm track as Vaynshtok began to strangle dulcet tones from the PSP. It was suddenly easy to remember what it’s like to sweat it up in a crowd at a local show.

A nervous glance to the side reveals William Alton, head of Grannie Annie records, a label he slapped together for these two virtuosos. Alton leans over with a smile and says he just met Rychko for the first time that night. Forgivable. Perhaps due to the fresh emotional energy that Grannie Annie and Fight like Animals exude, like a new scent forced upon you while trying to sneak through the main isle at Macy’s, then your girl tells you later how nice you smell…for once.

Vaynshtok and Rychko finish early, but fans from Facebook are still filtering in, so the two guitar grapplers run through an improv of “Purple Haze,” then play their set again.

More of the Granny Annie mob showed up, too.

Brett Flaherty is the latest to sign on. He’s producing the duos debut E.P., “Cave Dwellers.” Like many in the crowd, Flaherty couldn’t help but be awe-struck by the pair’s youthful exuberance. Flaherty’s wife and business partner, Misty Black, may have summed up that awe best. “We’d make millions if we could just find a way to manufacture and mainline these guys’ energy,” Black said.

With a name like Fight Like Animals, inspired by a killer painting of two dudes fighting in animal masks, the marketing plan seems to be writing itself, even spawning the photo shoots. And the duos good-natured rivalry, born of years of hanging together, makes watching them even more compelling and endearing.

At their Myspace page (myspace.com/fightlikeanimals) Steve and Vlad are plastered to the walls. Their latest video, just posted a few days ago, is one of their original tracks called “Two Words.” And all the video tracks are instrumentals, with nice and gritty guitars layered on top of a grooving electro beat bleeding through the PSP, and Vaynshtok and Rychko trading up on rhythm and lead throughout. The best part is, the audio is recorded directly through the camera’s mic, and it sounds great.

It’s a brave new world of promotion, really — the guys are able to shmooze with their audience (and the ladies) then seamlessly launch right into the jam.

Whether they realize it or not, sacrificing the old school method of overloading Myspace with mp3s, in favor of posting videos as the only source of original material could be genius. It let’s the listener morph into a viewer, capable of identifying with a couple of buddies on a more personal level that.

“We prefer to think of people who like our music as friends we can play for, the idea of having ‘fans’ just doesn’t sit well with us,” Vaynshtok said.

Both Vaynshtok and Rychko were born in the Ukraine. Vaynshtok moved to the U.S. as a toddler, and talking to him reveals he’s been thoroughly Americanized. His banter is full of that “let-me-show-you-something” kind of self-confidence that has helped move Fight Like Animals out of their living room and into the wider world of the music business, setting the stage for his own bands success and even managing a friend’s hip hop group called Soul Riders. (myspace.com/soulridershiphop.) A self-taught musician, Vaynshtok is indispensable in formulating the Fight Like Animals sound

Rychko is the true student of the two, giving Vaynshtok room to handle the ins and outs of the local scene, while he focuses on composition and winking at the band’s growing grapevine of groupies. Also raised in the Ukraine, Rychko studyed voice and guitar since age 7, when he told his supportive father that he was in love with the six-string — his dad rushed out and bought him his first acoustic. Rychko continued his studies in the Ukraine until age 10, when he moved to the States. The guys soon evolved to play off one another’s music, and wit, deftly.

Influenced by new groups like RATATAT (to whom Fight Like Animals pay homage to with an original track of the same name), Ra Ra Riot, Japandi and others, the Fight Like Animals sound is energetic heavy rock riffs, timed brilliantly to complement the freshness of the ever-evolving beats — it’s not your typical four-beat bass drum dance music that wide-eyed inebriated club kids clamor for. But don’t get it twisted, this music gets you moving, few at the Hot Topic in-store could help but start nodding heads. Perhaps mainlining these guys isn’t the future, or maybe they already flipped a bitch on us and they’re going airborne inoculation on the asses of the masses.

Find out more about Fight Like Animals at myspace.com/fightlikeanimals and grannieannierecords.com.