Meet Joshua Sommerfeld, Marty Muzik and Stryker Holland of 3420 in Fort Collins

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joshua Sommerfeld, Marty Muzik and Stryker Holland.

Joshua, Marty, Stryker, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
We are a three piece group that combines Denver’s signature bass music with a full live band. The group started off in 2018 with Marty and Josh with the original bassist Eric Beutel. He is actually the one who coined the name 3420. We released a three song Ep in January 2019 called “Come Up” and started to organize house shows so we could start to build a presence in the local scene. We ran into pianist Aaron Marfizo, who then became a part of the group. This was the roster from March 2019 until July 2019. During that time, we had booked our first non-house shows, one at the Colorado Room in Fort Collins and then we got to open up for Skydyed at the Aggie Theatre. After that we started working on new music, and during that time frame other opportunities arose for Eric and Aaron and we had to part ways. We are still on extremely good terms with the two and are there to support them every step of the way. Around mid-august we started talking to Stryker who we had known but never really got to sit down and talk with. We met up one day and jammed and showed each other some works in progress, and the current lineup of 3420 was born. Since then we have played a late-night set at Gulchfest, played as direct support for Lespecial at the Aggie, and headlined our own show at Hodi’s Half Note in February right before the shutdown. Since then we’ve been perfecting several songs that we are going to be releasing on our upcoming EP “Bridging the Gap”, which will be public on all platforms 7/10.

Has it been a smooth road?
The biggest challenge of making the music that we make is that there is no real guideline on how to do things. We can take what we know about making electronic music and what we know about making music with live instruments and blend the two, but there are dozens of paths that all have the same end result and it’s a game of figuring out which of those is most efficient and effective. We’ve talked to others that are making the same kind of music that we do and no one does things the same, so there’s no real right or wrong way to go about it.

Please tell us about your music.
We create music that blends electronic sound design with live instruments and experiments with the boundaries of tension within music. The three of us have over a decade of experience playing our instruments and two to six years of experience using Logic and Ableton. One thing that we are really proud of is the amount of opportunity we have had to play in front of people in the short amount of time we’ve been a group. Something that sets us apart from a lot of other acts is that we are 21 and 22 years old, so we’re only just getting started with our sound.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
As of right now, it’s hard to say due to Corona shutting down music venues. Trying to stay positive, we think that right now is time for smaller acts to thrive, specifically artists that can easily keep small capacities for their shows. In other words, now is going to be the time of DIY venues with intimate performances between artists and fans.

Contact Info:

• Email: 3420music@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/3420music/
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/3420music
• Other: https://soundcloud.com/3420music

Image Credit:
Sam Sanders Media, Blocklisted Media

Suggest a story: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.