Help Gergo Get To Santa Rosa
This fundraiser is to help Gergo, 20 years old, travel from his home in Hungary to Santa Rosa, CA to record an album, meet his long-time best friend in person, and play shows. Gergo suffers from serious chronic health problems in cluding a brain tumor. This is his story:
I met Gergo in 2014 while promoting my music to other producers and DJs as a part of a very small Internet sub culture. After sending each other some music and realizing that we had a similar artistic vision, we decided to start making music together under the name Dead Stare.
Soon after, I learned that Gergo had a tumor in his brain, among other serious health problems including epillepsy, severe food allergies and some chronic physically disabling symptoms that he hasn't even been able to get diagnosed. Gergo, who lives alone with his mother, cannot work due to his disabilities and is constantly struggling financially. Not being able to do any regular outdoor activities, and feeling hopeless that he will ever get his tumor treated, Gergo also suffers from severe depression.
The conversations that led up to creating Dead Stare were very important to each of us. We had a shared vision of emotionally expressive heavy dance music; dark, moody, and danceable. Unfortunately, we found ourselves in an Internet sub culture where the lastest trend in music dictated what up-and-coming artists were releasing. Making music with emotional expression as the criteria was a unique but challenging idea: we sacrificed the much-sought-after "plays" and "views" in exchange for putting out our most honest work. Gergo was so inspired by these ideas that he quit making music under his solo name to work on Dead Stare full time.
Besides his physical disabilities, Gergo's financial situation make it very hard to carry out his passion for music. Slow and unreliable Internet access, an outdated PC, and virtually no acecss to professional equipment means that it takes days or weeks for Dead Stare to complete a project that would otherwise take hours.
Gergo has expressed to me several times throughout our friendship that he feels our musical collaborations have saved his life. Sometimes in his depression he feels that he has nothing to live for but music. In dealing with the Hungarian medical system, Gergo and his mother find themselves up against a frustratingly slow, unaffordable and at times corrupt beurocracy that makes his tumor treatment a very long, drawn-out and emotional process with no guaranteed results.
Gergo's visit to Santa Rosa would not only allow Dead Stare to record a full length album in a professional studio, but would give Gergo the emotional strength he needs to battle his illness. Performing live as Dead Stare is also one of Gergo's dreams.
The funds raised in this campaign will go to plane tickets and trip expenses, medications for trip emergencies, and possibly some basic music equipment that Gergo can take back to Hungary.
We humbly ask our community to help Gergo and I fulfill our dreams of meeting in person and showing California what Dead Stare is really all about.
The links below can help show how much success we've been able to achieve with the very little resources we have now. Please check out the excerpts!
Thank you for reading <3
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-Debut of our first release, "Dead Stare EP," on Cassette Blog, a Mexican independent music platform.
http://cassetteblog.com/2014/07/dead-stare-dead-stare-ep-exclusivos-cassette/
"It's as if they had come together to compose material with Jason Forrest, (his most extreme side), Otto Von Schirach (during an electric shock like when he used to use accelerated rhythms but adding a little bit of his new Latin spirit), Javier Estrada with a hangover after 10 days of drunkenness, Kettel with his most moving and floating melodies, Nguzunguzu with his dizzying gangster bass, DJ Otto on a bad ketamine trip, Munchi when he blows away the fence and just starts setting fire to everything, and Alec Empire in one of those mornings when he gets up wanting to go out with his shotgun to kill people, but he decides to stay at home and compose one of those infernal pieces that are so dark they also have some mystical, "universal look" towards the infinite blackness."
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-Review of "Dead Stare EP" on Generation Bass
http://www.generationbass.com/2014/07/26/dead-stare-gekkei-dj-broken-record-dead-stare-ep-free-download/
"The first fruit of these two passionate minds coming together is the most forward looking, exciting experiments in bass music that I’ve seen in a long time, if not all time."
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-Interview with Generation Bass after releasing a track entitled "Tumor"
http://www.generationbass.com/2015/11/09/you-can-win-any-kind-of-fight-if-you-really-want-dead-stares-struggle-with-the-fragility-of-life-interview/
"The track hit me like an ice cold shower. The progressively unpacking chain explosion of conflicting extreme emotions such as despair, anger, fear and determination feels like a glacial, metallic liquid injected into your back spine, slowly spreading into all cappilaries and fibers of your existence."
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Interview with Hungarian magazine "Recorder"
http://recorder.blog.hu/2015/02/14/magyarradar_exkluziv_mix_dead_stare
"It is almost self-evident that the duo's music is special and absolutely elusive; it uniquely blends into a variety of electronic music sounds from dubstep to a future bass to hardstyle, accentuated Latin American (tradition-inspired) dance music bases and dark puddles."
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Review of "Dead Stare Presents: Boombahchero Vol. 5"
http://cassetteblog.com/2016/10/dead-stare-boombahchero-vol-5/
"Gergo and DJ Broken Record have left the bar high in this experimental hybrid-style tour that still has a lot to give called" Boombahchero, "and that by the way, they close in an unusual way with the remix to" Metamorphosis One ", a song by one of the most innovative and experimental musicians of the modern era, maestro Philip Glass. "
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-Article about Dead Stare "reviving" the genre of Boombahchero
http://www.generationbass.com/2016/09/13/dead-stare-peligrosa-have-just-revived-boombahchero/
" Dead Stare’s predilection to blend afro-Latin rhythms with breakcore, techno and energetic bass is far from a joke, it is an expression of the daily struggle against injustice in two different places in the world: DJ Broken Record as a Mexican in the US where the genie of racism and anti-immigrant hatred is summoned out of the bottle by the very man who might be elected into office and Gergö as a cancer and epilepsia patient in a reactionary Hungary where you cannot get proper healthcare if you’re not rich."
Listen to Dead Stare music here: https://soundcloud.com/deadstare
