Taking music to another realm

By Alex Roman
Daily Forty Niner

The band Elements of the Outer Realm believes that music can be a unique tool. They see it as an art form that in it's most powerful moments can attack all your senses and take you to a place inside yourself that you never knew existed.

"I love the connection with the audience and the band when things are going well" said Christian Mendoza, the band's lyricist and Cal State Long Beach history major. "You could feel this energy and you realize that you've created an atmosphere where time and the outside world doesn't exist."

The Long Beach based band will be playing on campus on Sept. 20 at noon. The show will be a sort of homecoming for the band since four out of seven of the band members are students at CSULB.

"We're anxious for the show," said bassist J. Michael Roy, a senior health care administration. "We've got a fan-base now, but we want to bring more people into our little circle and expand it."

Mendoza and Roy are joined by journalism senior Derrick Engoy on vocals, Reginald Spivey (drums), JoJo Villanueva (keyboards), Genesis (sax and djembe) and senior health science major Ian Azuelo (guitar).

The band was completed over a year, however they not only took a while to find all the correct parts, but also to find their distinct sound.

"We all kind of just met," Mendoza said. "Because a lot of us were supposed to go to different schools, it's one of those things that logically doesn't fit, but does."

About the forming of the band Roy said, "You could almost say it's like fate or destiny that we all met."

The band began when Mendoza, Roy and Azuelo met and formed a rap/rock band which eventually failed.

"It was wasting our musical talent," Mendoza said of the groups beginning. "Everyone was better than what they were actually playing."

"The story goes that we did an acoustic thing just the three of us at a poetry night" Roy said. "It was just me Chris and Ian and it was dope. That night Chris went up to Derrick and asked him if he was in or out and Derrick just said 'Yeah I'm down."

"It was kind of funny because we still didn't have all our parts yet," Mendoza added.

After a lot of trial and error, the Outer Realm finally added Villanueva, Spivey and Genesis. Genesis was the first of the three to be added.

"We had all these musical ideas and we wanted to put them down, but because we had no drummer we had no beats" Roy said. "So Genesis and I went to go see Derrick at work and we saw a flier to go take djembe lessons with some guy at El Dorado Park, so we kind of asked Genesis if he wanted to learn the djembe and he said yes."

The band sound mixes with the messages of their songs, taking your mind on a musical journey and leaving something for everyone to latch onto.

"Some people love Derrick and Chris' lyrics," Roy said. "Other people won't even get the lyrics, but they'll get the music."

"What makes this world beautiful is the diversity of it," Mendoza added. "In a sense our music kind of shows that. With all the different styles of music that we have, it shows that music is a mirror image of culture just like food and language and we show that it can all happen harmoniously."

The band financed, recorded and put out their self-titled EP on their own. The disc is anchored by "Circadian Rhythm," a song that is a trip through a person's sleep pattern as well as sending the message that technology is not god.

"We're just trying to help people out and help them realize that the current trend is going to be disastrous for humanity," Mendoza said.

"I think the outlook has to come from our majors," Mendoza said about the bands lyrical content. "Derrick's a journalism major and I'm in history, so it kind of makes you look at the world and the way things are in a different view."

As for what the future holds, the band though unsure knows just how far they're willing to take their burgeoning success.

"We want to take it as far as it goes," Mendoza said.

"Success to us is what's going on now," Roy said. "We're gaining fans along the way, we get to play a lot and get our music out there. That's success to us, at least how we gage it."

For now, the band will continue to play and spread its beautiful diverse message in an attempt to take you the listener to a place that you've never been.

"The beautiful thing about our music is that it's bringing musical genres to people who otherwise wouldn't hear it," Mendoza said. "It's bringing them a different flavor and breaking the monotony of their life, introducing them to something new that they just might like.