Fanshawe grad hosts House music bands in his basement

Recent Fanshawe College Music Industry Arts (MIA) graduate Preston Lobzun has been busy.

Between playing bass or drums in numerous death metal and noise bands, running the recently defunct house venue Satan’s Cove, he still finds the time to keep recording and pressing his own cassette tapes and CDs for over a dozen bands in said house.

Hailing from a rural area outside Windsor, Lobzun said it was always a tossup between going to London and Windsor to see good shows.

“Where I’m from there’s no music, it’s [the] Legion cover rock bands… so you have to go into the city for anything remotely exciting happening,” Lobzun said.

Windsor is also where Lobzun was first introduced to the DIYstyle and unfiltered world of house shows.

“I went to my first house show at a place called Holden House. It was your typical house or punk show. There were people that were just rough and tough, everyone’s drinking, doing drugs; it was a culture shock,” Lobzun said.

After moving to London to attend MIA, Lobzun started seeing house shows at different venues around London.

“I remember this one really bad house; the nail in the coffin happened when the septic tank pipe burst and poop went everywhere.”

After seeing enough bad promoters and bad venues Lobzun’s basement became home to local acts, with a creative venue name.

“I used to call my house ‘The Shire’,” he said. “We originally went with that because my roommate’s nickname is Frodo, [and with the] low ceilings people were always hitting their head.”

Around that time the, now closed, Blackshire Pub started going by this name, forcing The Shire to change to Satan’s Cove, a Wi-Fi name in Lobzun’s neighbourhood that stood out to him as a good name.

Satan’s Cove proved very popular and despite Lobzun taking a break from hosting any more shows at the moment, the entire experience has left him with some sage advice on the topic.

The experience also led him to start a blog aptly named iwannadohouseshows about the logistics of having bands perform in your house and how to keep people from wrecking your stuff.

“I saw someone I know post on Facebook about wanting to do some shows and I was always giving people tips,” said Lobzun. If the blog is popular enough, he may even move into a physical ‘zine format.

Now that he’s graduated, Lobzun is putting more time into finishing his first ever RPG video game, created from the ground up, including music, levels and item explanations.