TRUE AND TOXIC | EAST BAY EXPRESS

Late Aster: New directions in classical rock

Byj. poet

Late Aster is reinventing the way pop music is heard. The music the quartet produced on True and Toxic, their debut EP, breaks with convention by allowing the French horn and trumpet to play the hooks and lead melodies that are usually introduced by electric guitars or keyboards in most bands. 

The members of the band got together during their years of studying classical music and jazz at university. “I was at Northwestern for a degree in classical trumpet performance,” said Aaron Messing, who also plays keyboards and synthesizers. “Charles [Mueller; guitar, synthesizers], Cameron [LeCrone; drums] and I started a band in college, a standard rock format with hardly any brass. We made some recordings but, after graduation, Cameron and Charles moved East, so we kept up a long-distance musical relationship.”

He added, “I met Anni [Hochhalter, French horn, vocals] in 2013 and we started working on music together. We kept writing songs, but gradually we started feeling the music was missing an important part of who we were as musicians. We kept the same rock/pop vibe but started sprinkling trumpet and French horn into the arrangements. As we experimented with ways to process the brass instruments, we got more comfortable with the new sound. It soon dominated our process and our idea of what the music could be.”