Good music lasts and good bands evolve. After seven years and over two hundred shows, Ad Astra Per Aspera is more than music: it's an all-ages, open-invitation collective dedicated to all things small, epic, lakeside and beautiful. It's a collection of inside jokes, broken down vans, mix tapes, prank calls, histories and pre-histories that snowballs through all seasons.

Beginning in 2001 in Lawrence, KS, Ad Astra Per Aspera practiced for a year before introducing their music to friends and friends' basements. After releasing their first seven-inch, An Introduction To, Ad Astra Per Aspera got their shit together and hit the road. Between releases and tours, the band played warehouses, record stores, gallery spaces, living rooms and industrial medical centers.

In 2004, Ad Astra released a four-song EP, Cubic Zirconia, a spooky, pretty EP that travels the back roads of Kansas with no headlights and no destination in mind. They toured aggressively and leaked oil all over the Midwest in a battered short bus. Between 2005 and 2006, Ad Astra worked on their full-length, Catapult Calypso, a marriage of sleigh bells and rhumba shakers, easy front porch rhythms and furious punk breakdowns, free jazz and Monterey pop. They visited Texas for South by Southwest, New York for CMJ and skated around the country on an inch of highway ice.

During 2007 and 2008, the band has woken up earlier and stayed up later than ever, nursing their creative drive with coffee and red wine. The local record nerds at Love Garden are putting out Ad Astra's new seven-inches, a series of four lovingly assembled records that borrow from Black Sabbath, Fela Kuti and the voices and instrumentation of best friends. The first seven-inch in the series, Danger Bird Blues, was released in July 2008 and the second, Party Bones, in September. With the recent re-release of Catapult Calypso on vinyl and the prospect of many new collaborations, Ad Astra Per Aspera is more vibrant than ever, rattling with nervous energy and dead serious about doing it right.

-Flannery Cashill, Fall 2008

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