Local bands often shape and represent their community and its culture. The Manhattan Project, a four-member local band with a unique ability to blend genres, serves exactly that purpose for Manhattan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Though primarily categorized as alt-rock, their range of musical abilities as one group creates sounds reminiscent of \u201890s grunge, classic rock and a skill for improvisational performances that make each of their shows unique.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Their versatile abilities can be attributed to the different musical backgrounds each member brings to the table.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Parker Floersch, vocalist and guitarist and junior in physical science, has been musically trained for the majority of his life. He has primarily resonated with jam bands and blues-based music.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up in the choir system, so I\u2019ve sang basically my entire life,\u201d Floersch said. \u201cFor as long as I can remember, I wanted to play guitar, and I got my first guitar for my 11th birthday, so that puts me going on 12 years of playing the guitar. I was just always infatuated with music \u2026 my mom was a big proponent of showing me classic rock and older music, so I grew up on stuff outside of my generation, and that always made me want to be a performer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Similarly to Floersch, Keeton Foust, bassist and sophomore in mechanical engineering, inherited his love for music from his family.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMy older brother trailblazed a lot,\u201d Foust said. \u201cHe taught me my first song on the guitar, which was the \u201cHow I Met Your Mother\u201d theme song. He put out that path for me \u2026 the first instrument I ever got into was the ukulele. I went to online school for all of freshman year, so I would spend my whole day in my room just playing ukulele because I was bored. Then that eventually turned into bass, because a lot of people need bassists, and I thought it was fun.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In contrast, Zander Barkemeier, drummer and senior in finance, found his love for the drums and music more organically. His main interests lie within the \u201890s grunge genre.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up in a non-musical household, so it wasn\u2019t really pushed on me to learn anything,\u201d Barkemeier said. \u201cThen, in very early high school, my little brother picked up the drums, but didn\u2019t care for it that much \u2026 so, I thought I\u2019d try it. \u2026 Then I found I have a natural thing for it, and I really liked it. By the time of late sophomore to early junior year, it took over my entire life. I quit all the sports I was doing, I quit any other hobby or activity I was a part of, and I only did music. I just practiced for hours in my basement, and then I joined a couple bands in the area. I gigged every weekend for about two or three years.\u201d<\/p>\n
The band came together after the young musicians met at Jam Cat Collective, a club for musicians on campus to meet and interact.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all started going to these meetings, and I had met Keeton probably twice before one of those meetings,\u201d Floersch said. \u201c \u2026 Then one time we both went, and Zander was there, and he was the only drummer in the club that had really known what they were doing at the time. So, we asked him immediately if he would like to come out and jam.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the three met through the Jam Cat Collective group, The Manhattan Project came to life. According to Floersch, their unique name pays homage to home.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe recently expanded and grabbed Luke, another guitar player, and we became a four-piece band, which has been really helpful for the intricacy of our live performances,\u201d Floersch said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With their different musical backgrounds combined, the members of The Manhattan Project possess a spirited style of performance and collaboration.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like what we are at the heart of our band is a jam band,\u201d Floersch said. \u201cOften on stage where we\u2019ll just do an open jam section as one of the songs for our set list, where somebody just plays something, and then we all load in together and see what becomes of it. And again, we all come from quite different backgrounds, so it is interesting to see what comes out of that \u2026 We do a little bit of everything, which is a lot of fun when we\u2019re playing covers. We\u2019ll play country music, pop music, we\u2019ll play some heavier stuff, almost metal, even \u2026 alt rock, everything in between. So, it keeps it refreshing for us. We\u2019re kind of fluid throughout genres like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like other local bands, The Manhattan Project strives to contribute to and retain a vibrant live-music scene in Manhattan. However, local law restricts live performances outside of Aggieville in Manhattan, making performance opportunities for local bands scarce.<\/p>\n
Floersch feels that maintaining a live music scene in Manhattan creates a strong community.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cLive music is everything to people like us,\u201d Floersch said. \u201cIt creates community, it creates involvement and if anything, it detracts from environments that create danger, that create anything that the city should be worried about. So, it\u2019s huge to have that kind of access as a young musician and for people who are just as into music as we are, even without being a musician. We have a large network of friends that we\u2019ve come to love simply because they are music enjoyers.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Floersch and Barkemeier, the most memorable experiences of performing as a band are the instances in which they felt immense support from their community. Floersch reminisced about one of these moments, when they played their first show at a rooftop bar in Aggieville, opening for a local band named South Wind.<\/p>\n
\u201cA big piece of the community is knowing the other bands and supporting each other, and South Wind helped us out with our first big opportunity,\u201d Floersch said. \u201cI remember playing to the sunset, we\u2019re facing out towards the beautiful sky, beautiful colors, just feeling so proud of the effort we put in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barkemeier will always remember a feel-good moment where their audience became immersed in their performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith a lot of backyard parties, some people will watch, and some will be off doing their own thing,\u201d Barkemeier said. \u201cWe do a cover of \u2018Linger\u2019 by the Cranberries, and right when we started that song the entire crowd stopped what they were doing and all ran up to right in front of where we were, and the entire crowd interlocked with each other and started swaying and singing along with us, and they all had their flashlights out so the entire yard was like one big flashlight.\u201d<\/p>\n
The band will release their first original on all streaming services on April 30, just in time for a live show later that night.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Local bands often shape and represent their community and its culture. The Manhattan Project, a four-member local band…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198904,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[79199,75,84,83,2538,9,24,63],"class_list":{"0":"post-198903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manhattan","8":"tag-local-band","9":"tag-manhattan","10":"tag-manhattan-headlines","11":"tag-manhattan-news","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-nyc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}