Crash Encore was co-founded by Jon Bishop, who has been at the forefront of the Southern California techno scene since 1991. His radio show Sounds of the Underground on 92.5 FM was one of the first electronica/techno music programs to air. In 1992 he cofounded Club Hedonism at Rich’s in Hillcrest, an event that ran weekly for over a decade, sometimes drawing upwards of 1000 patrons and earning press in Playboy and Details magazines.
Bishop began writing and recording with band co-founder and producer Bryan Stratman at Capricorn Studios in 2006, alongside TJ Royer (guitar), Jackson Price (bass, vocals, flute), and Mike Cooper (drums).
After recording their debut album Volume 1, they were nominated for a 2007 San Diego Music Award as Best New Artist. On January 1, 2009, the band announced that they would post one free song for download every week for the next year.
Thirty weeks into the project, keyboardist Bryan Stratman and drummer Mike Cooper split from the group in order to focus on their own ambitions.
“We were going crazy recording every week on top of playing shows and everything else,” says Bishop, who has gone on to play his songs solo acoustic and with backing band Albatross, featuring members of Gun Runner.
Bishop’s more recent project, Hello Sunshine (with sister Joy, her husband Jeffery, and Stratman), licensed their song “Happy Endings” for the opening credits of romantic comedy My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, starring Alyssa Milano and Beau Bridges. They anticipate an album release in a few months after Joy gives birth to the couple’s first child.
As of mid-2010, Cooper and Stratman’s indie-electro project Hyena has been gaining momentum locally, playing at venues such as the Casbah, Voyeur, Fluxx, and House of Blues. In the span of four months, they’d written, recorded (at Stratman’s Capricorn Studios on Tenth and E Street in East Village), and released their debut album, We See You. Cooper left Transfer in 2010, which he’d been drumming for for the past five years, in order to focus on Hyena.