Artist Spotlight: Robot Witch
Starry Nights Charity held their third annual event at Company Brewing Saturday evening – this year raising funds for organizations Habitat for Humanity and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs PTSD and Mental Health Support. Local talent Bradley, Robot Witch (fronted by Matthew Lubus, who runs Starry Nights), and Whiskey and the Devil all played sets.
“It started about three years ago,” Lubus explained about his charity. “I knew as a musician I wanted to give back some way, somehow. I’ve been to some other charity events and figured this is what I know how to do – throw musical events. It started that way and we had it again a second year and blew it up to two nights with eight bands; Landmark Lanes did all the sound for free, which was great. This year my partner Elsa joined me..now she’s running Starry Nights with me and we’ve been looking to expand to four events a year…like do one a season. It’s going from being a winter Christmas-y thing to hopefully four. It’s all about helping out different charities – that’s as a charity what we do. We pick one we know around here…first year was the Baby Food Bank, last year was Make-A-Wish. Hopefully we’ll do more than just musical events, so we’ll see what can come up…maybe something comedy or food-related.”
Robot Witch consists of Lubus as vocalist/synthesizer, guitarist Ryan Koski, bassist Jimmy Rocco, and drummer Eric Morrissey. The band plays dance-able, electronic-infused psychedelic rock that finds Lubus vocally experimenting with singing, spoken-word, and the Vocoder. The project emerged from the ashes of Lubus’ previous band Moth Light and is actually named after Elsa.
“I wanted to start doing more touring and things like that, and I was playing in Moth Light, and there were five of us so it was kind of hard to tour. I tapped an old drummer and we went on the road going to Nashville and Louisville last summer. We started playing “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground and I thought it’d be cool to do a guitar loop. I hit up one of my guitar buddies – that was Ryan. We played that loop on stage and it was fun…then we found a bass player. It went from a way to book other shows and do more jamming, to pretty much forming another band. I went from more of a songwriter role where I was just playing synth to taking on lead vocals and writing songs but letting Ryan co-write on guitar. Moth Light was singer-synth-bass with two drummers.”
Lubus explains what the band is working on now.
“We already went into the studio; we have one single online and it’s that Velvet Underground cover. We wrote a bunch of material and are editing it right now…hopefully we’ll get an EP out by spring. I always feel like releasing something in winter sucks; you won’t get a lot of people out to your show and it’s better waiting for it to warm up again. I also got really busy doing this solo project thing for school…I wrote a concept album and that took up a lot of time as my senior thesis. Now it’s back to focusing on this stuff cuz I love it…it’s really exciting because it’s still totally in its infancy. We did it with MadScienceAudioLabs – my buddy Kyle does amazing work with electronic, metal, punk…dude’s a musician himself and has been a great contact. We also worked with Dashcam on a bunch of stuff, so you’ll see his name attached to the project too.”
Thank you to all that came out to support Starry Nights Charity!! Stay tuned for more cultural-based events helping those in need within our city in 2020.
