I don't think we change much from who we are in high school.

In high school, in Kingston Ontario, I played in a band called the Slinks that covered Iggy Pop, Bowie, Lou Reed, the Talking Heads, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the B-52s, Junior Wells and Rick James (we would have liked to cover Funkadelic, but we weren't good enough. Plus Superfreak is a great song). I got to sing Iggy's "Girls" 'cause I had a low voice, though I'm sure my real life experience with girls was the most limited in the band. After high school, some of the Slinks went on to make a living playing music (and at least one still does today), but I decided to go to university and hang out on beaches in Thailand, which somewhat circuitously led me to where I am now. But I've never felt right unless I was in a band. During grad school I spent summers in Kingston, and was in a band called Hungry Tim that got to be a part of an exciting music scene, centered around a music studio (the Funhouse) run by Grant Ethier, the Slinks drummer who had gone on to play in 13 Engines. Hungry Tim recorded some music at the Funhouse we circulated on cassette. The other members of Hungry Tim went on to play in two great bands: Weeping Tile (Paul Gurnsey) and the HellBillys (Matt Dickson). I went on to get my Ph.D. (Am I sounding bitter? I'm not. Really!)

Atomica started a few years ago when I was watching Radio Four at the Flywheel, and realized they were playing the sort of music I had always been playing, and they had given it a name - discopunk. I wrote some songs and recorded them with Grant, who I knew would understand discopunk - we spent an afternoon listening to a bunch of Bohannon and recording the drum tracks. I hoped I could give the cd to people and they would want to play discopunk too, though I found no takers in Northampton. But New Years Eve 2004, Frank Sinistra and I had a jam session, and I could tell he was a discopunk. I was pretending to play drums then, but met Tien-Yi and realized I was just a guitarist - she is a real drummer. We played a show at the Flywheel summer 2004 opening for Neptune. We lost Tien-Yi, but then found Rainy, who makes us old guys rock. We've got a lot of new songs you can hear if you come to one of our shows - recordings soon.

Discopunk - well apparently that's passe now, and we're really neither disco nor punk, but we still get the disco ball going before we play. And we like to wear outfits. And I'm still Joey Potato.