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Hi! We are Ozymandias and Harakoa, the two voices of synthwave/heavy metal band Alpha Boötis.
We went to school in Montreal, Canada, which has a very different grade system.
Let’s talk about our Secondaire 4, which is the equivalent to sophomore year of American high school.
1. There is nothing more awkward than sophomore year of high school. Tell me about your circle of friends.
Ozymandias: I had a totally different friend group outside of school than I did at school. Outside- of the classroom, my friends included Harakoa and a few other fellow nerds that I played D&D with every week, as well as watching movies and talking about arts and history.
I was one of the few musicians in my grade at school, so I would hang out with the other musicos and talk about post-rock, prog rock and djent -- which was the hot new thing in those years. Politics were also a very present subject, and being one of the more left-leaning person in the school, I had my fair share of heated debates.
I’m not really in contact with anyone from my high school, but the D&D gang is still a very important part of my social circle to this day… especially my dear bandmate Harakoa.
Harakoa: I too had a different group of friends at school. At the start of high school, I was actually very short and had a bad temper. Secondaire 4 was when I suddenly grew a feet and a half in just a few months, and that was when everyone stopped picking on me.
Because of my experience with bullying, I was hostile to everyone for much of my highschool. I learned a year prior, from a guy that was picking on me regularly, that maybe they wouldn’t annoy me if I stopped ignoring them when they said hello…
Apart from my D&D gang, I had few friends at school, but I’d say secondaire 4 is when I began to more widely consider other people in my school as friendly.
2. By this time in my life, I'd given up on all extracurriculars in my school. Tell me about how you spent your afternoons.
Ozymandias: I was heavily involved in the school’s trivia club, and won many trivia competitions. Aside from reading a lot and listening to many, many hours of progressive music, I played a ton of video games -- especially Runescape, Age of Empires and SimCity.
My afternoons were pretty average I’d say. Ofc, I also spent many hours writing impossible songs and trying to get a band off the ground!
Harakoa: I was somewhere between composing music, writing poems (fake it until you make it, right?), and finally integrating myself in school.
I think in secondaire 3, the year before, I started playing ball hockey and soccer in my high school. It was a good way to release my aggressivity at first, and it later became my main social activity at school. I also did a student radio broadcast.
I was annoyed by the lack of interest of most broadcasts in the lyrics of music, so on my show there was an emphasis on vulgarizing the lyrics of the songs I played. I think my afternoons at home weren’t ideal though. I played a lot of video games, Runescape amongst them, but it wasn’t a good time in my life to spend time alone.
Sinking in melancholia by listening to music playlists until 2am ain’t really healthy.
3. During this time is when I finally discovered Pink Floyd. I had a copy of The Wall on cassette. It was a grey one. That album was my escape. Let's hear about your favorite album from back then. What format was it on?
Ozymandias: I was very hungry for new music in those days, but the album I listened to the most in that year was definitely Fortress by Protest The Hero. I have that album on CD, but I mostly listened through my cellphone or on YouTube.
I must’ve seen Protest The Hero 5 or 6 times in my teenage years, basically every time they came around Montréal. It was also the year I discovered Architects, one of my all-time favourites, when I saw them open for Bring Me The Horizon on the “There is a Hell…” tour.
I had never heard of them or their music before that night, and “Follow The Water” stayed in my head all night afterwards. I bought two of their records at the gig!
Harakoa: I changed a lot depending on my mood. If I felt emotionally calm, I would listen to something very different that if I needed to grind angrily through my day to make it.
I don’t know which album I listened to the most, honestly, but I listened to a lot of Katatonia; I know the album ‘’Discouraged Ones’’ was amongst them. However, I also started listening to a lot more of Radiohead, Velvet Acid Christ, and Wumpscut.
Of course, Dead Can Dance was always in my heart, and I always listened to a certain level of post-medieval, renaissance and baroque music. All these albums were in CD format.
I had a portable CD player with me.
4. What was the name of your high school and did you have a favorite class?
Ozymandias: My school was Jean-de-Brébeuf, an elite private school founded by Jesuits. I chose it because they gave Latin classes, and those were my favourites throughout highschool.
Learning Roman history and Latin together, reading two-thousand-year-old texts in their original language, had a profound impact on me.
Harakoa: I went to Robert Gravel, although it was called Saint-Louis by the time. It was a public school specialized in theater.
This is why I went there; there were as many theater classes as there were French classes, our main language course, about eight classes per two weeks.
I think I really needed this class to learn to "deal" with most people, channeling the way I express myself so that people would understand me. Being on a stage helped me a lot.
I think I would have already shut myself away from the world if it weren’t for those classes.
5. How did your school's football team do that season?
Ozymandias: High school football isn’t a big deal in Canada. Brébeuf was very proud of its Lacrosse team, although I think we got beaten by Kahnawake’s team that year. I wasn’t really into sports.
Harakoa: We did not have a football team. It was a very small school, maybe 350 people at the time. I think there were "ultimate frisbee" competitions, but I do not know how it went that year.
6. What instrument were you playing at that time?
Ozymandias: I was playing guitar and singing quite a bit, while also trying to learn how to scream properly. I had a band that was going nowhere, for which I wrote (and constantly rewrote songs) that we were barely able to play and remember because they had 19 sections and 7 time signatures…
Let’s say that I learnt a lot about what didn’t work (and eventually what did) in music during these formative years. Throughout our teenage years, Harakoa and I developed the chemistry that makes us such a great writing team today.
Harakoa: Yeah, we learned to communicate. Apart from the piano lessons I began at 7, I had no formation in musical analysis.
It’s really hard to understand each other when my only way to describe a part of the song is to sing it. I kept playing the piano at the time, composing a little (I didn’t know how to call some of the chords, but they were pretty).
I also sang a lot and played the recorder regularly. I had a lot of fun collecting as many portable musical instruments as possible. I still do that now; I’m actually planning to buy an overtone flute in a few days. I think secondaire 4 is when I decided that my calling in this world was to be a bard.
Conclusion
Thank you very much for having us, this was a very cool angle for a music interview! We have a new EP coming out December 11th. It features a song about Stowaway Ants hijacking humanity’s space colonization efforts to become the interstellar species.
As you can see, our 15 year old selves would be proud of the big nerds we still are!
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