Florida Daze to Jersey Bound

Before Hype & Party were stealing fine white wines, they were sinking ships, stacking hardened blocks of clay and trekking towards the great Garden State. These journeys through trial & error are what made the dynamic duo we know today as The Wine Thieves. Without these fundamentals, "Sex & Co." would not exist. It all started with some pop-punk & a little balls-to-the-wall, rip your throat out hardcore ... in a "budding" university known only as William Paterson.

Known then by their government names, Jason & Ryan, the duo met through a mutual friend, Aaron Gagnon (AKA Gumshu, the Wine Thieves sound engineer). At this point, the two had no idea of one an other's love for rhymes & beats, but a friendship was formed almost immediately. Both fellas were playing guitar for two separate bands at the time, but the two started free styling outside the Willy P parking lots & sidewalks not too long after meeting. The rhymes were clever & goofy, and the duo realized their mutual love for the absurd & dislike for societal restraints.

It didn't take long for J & R to quit their bands & start a group of their own, along side with Gumshu. The trio called themselves "Watershipdown". At first, all three members (known as Emcee Hype, Dryzzl & DJ Gumshu) were on the mic, with production credits going to NJ deejay Exxtrah. (sidenote: Yes, Party was once known as Dryzzl, get over it.)

But then something magical happened...

The musicians in Hype, Party and Gum became restless. They were no longer happy to just freestyle along with beats constructed by other artists. It was a mutual artistic realization: they need to create their own canvases. Gumshu, previously the lead guitarist alongside Hype in Jonny-o's punk rock band, started to tinker more with Cool Edit. Party started to cut up records and crash beta versions of Fruity Loops and shitty quantizers. And Hype scoured the sprawling yard-sales of the salvation army for vinyl and keys and things that make noise.

After two albums--The End of the World and The Dead--Watershipdown retired. Gumshu enrolled in Full-Sail in Florida (just south of Georgia) and Party and Hype bought a van, dubbed 'The Mystery Machine.' Sadly, The Mystery Machine would later emit it's last carbon monoxidic breath in Georgia (just north of Florida). They explored the inner sphere and once, in a parallel universe, a transformer exploded like a supernova. Once, with the trolls, Party saw a green-square friend of ours and Gumshu grew a thousand feet tall. And in Florida there was a store where you could play video games with your friends, each with your own TV and lazy boy, the lights perpetually dimmed and the gaming just as the dimmed lights: perpetual. Wicked shit, I assure you!

But--as happens--Hype and Party got bored with the notion of education, and bid Gumshu a momentary farewell. They packed up The Mystery Machine and got as far north as Georgia before the automobus's motor went to shit. So they hitch-hiked back to Blossburg, Pennsylvania where they made a record under the nom de plume, The Brix. Some thought that the name was actually an acronym for 'Totalitarian Hated Erasable Break Replaceable Idiosyncratic Xenophobes' . It was not. The record was called, Minding the Fort. It served as a head-bobbing reminder that someone, or some two at least, was watching the farm. The album saw Party.picasso taking over as full-time beat maker, armed with an MPC1000 he got in trade @ a local pawn shop in Orlando before they left. Hype was of course on the mic, spitting into a home-made pop filter & dabbling in Cool Edit with Party. As lo-fi as it was, the magic was there.

Gum graduated with flying faders and volume nobs cranked to the red and came back to Jersey, where the newly named Jersey Bound Trunk Crew was simmering. Hype and Party had literally arrived minutes before that monumental reuniting, after hitch-hiking a third of the way to Denver (the wrong direction... this is before civilians had GPS) and back again. So, immediately the trio records 'Get Down Dirty Disco' in a tiny Chatham room over the coarse of the summer; Hype on vocals; Party on beats & Gum on the boards. Momentous indeed! Even the wigs tried to pick up on that shit! Critical raves (with E and glow-sticks, I'd imagine)!

And then... The Wine Thieves... born out of soot and vile bile... hitch-hikes and looking glasses... distortion and reality in the same central cortex vortex... like two-be-headed-heads of John the Baptist, screaming into void of inner-wilderness... no, no, I'm getting ahead of the story... I should stop. For now. Keep yourself posted though ... you'll start to understand. We're already much past the plutonium phase... well on our way to the waxing-waning alignment. We'll talk.

Peace,
The Thieves

***addressing the tree of life demos...(Hype rapped in the 90s!?)***

((Ryan lost his government name when he was christened 'Hype' in 1999. Aptly named, it seemed, as Hype was both hyper-active (from the high chair) and spoke in gross hyperbole, like Christ and parables. Consequently, or inconsequentially, Hype released his first two rap demos that same year. The pair of demos, now as missing as the Ark of the Covenant and D.B. Cooper, was an ethereal hip hop two-act, now known only as 'the tree of life demos.'

As the artist-formerly-known-as Dryzzl (get over it), Party, explained... Hype's hip hop pursuits were momentarily shifted to the back burner, as he didn't have a deejay or a producer or a group or beats or a record. But he did have a guitar. So he played it. Meanwhile, and unbeknownst to the other (and unaware of each other's very existence) in a parallel and yet intersected universe, citizen Jason strummed and strat and screamed his guitar. When Davinci ran out of ink he designed spacecrafts... it was the same sort of thing.

It's the vibrations that bind the duo. The music. And so it was that the sound of music (not the movie) that brought them together... wait, wait... you know what, it was also 'The Sound of Music' the movie. God, Julia Andrews and Christopher Plummer... like a Von Trapp vocal extravaganza! Glorious, I say, glorious! Speaking of which, did you know 'The Sound of Music' soundtrack was released in 1965 by RCA and remains one of the most successful soundtracks of all time!? Wikipedia, check it.))