Altered Beast

ORIGINS: Inner West / Maroubra, NSW

GENRE: Hardcore / Powerviolence

YEARS ACTIVE: 2002-2005

 

MEMBERS:

• Anna Vo - Vocals
• Kipp Wood - Bass
• Tristan Still - Guitar
• Alex 'Deano' Wood - Drums

RELEASES:

• The Monstrous Sublime (2004) - Download Here.
• 1. Whatever I Have, I Have to Lose
• 2. Hydra Percipi
• 3. Cold Cut Euphony
• 4. La Petit Mort on the Bell's Line of Road
• 5. Sleep is One Less
• 6. Crown for the Young

• Unreleased EP (2005)

SUMMARY: Altered Beast was a hardcore/powerviolence band assembled by members from across the Northern Beaches and Hornsby area. The band played a range of shows in Sydney with various genres of heavy bands before folding after the recording of their still-unreleased second EP.

 

SHOWS: 

• Vic on the Park, Marrickville - 18th February, 2004
• Black Rose Bookshop, Chippendale - 20th March, 2004
• Bat and Ball Hotel, Surry Hills - 11th June, 2004
• Maggotville, Marrickville - 14th July, 2004
• The Harp, Tempe - 16th July, 2004
• Sounds for Sudan, Gaelic Club, Sydney - 1st October, 2004
• House Party, Redfern - 30th October, 2004
• Maggotville, Marrickville - 18th March, 2005

ORAL HISTORY  - recounted by Anna Vo, collected through Noise Levels correspondence (2025)

BEFORE THE BAND

I had been listening to grindcore since I was 14 and watching hardcore bands since I started putting on All Ages shows in Maroubra and Manly around the age of 15, so it was just a matter of time before I was in a band! Going to a strict all-girls school and looking for community outside of that is part of what had drawn me into that music. I was straight edge but didn't know any other XXX kids. I was also chairperson of Botany Randwick Youth Council, much to my chagrin, back in 1996 to 1998. We identified two things we wanted to do - rally for a skate park and put on more fun all-ages stuff. Bondi had all-ages shows through WAYS (Youth Centre) so I wanted us to have our own as well, but not just grunge (like Bondi seemed to have), haha. More punk and metal. So we met with NSW Premier Bob Carr and initiated the skate park that was finally built on the beach in 2001 and we put on several shows in the basement of what I think is called Hotel Maroubra now. We called it 'Maroubra Underground' - bands such as FDK, Restraint, and Sanctuary played.

With NSW Premier Bob Carr

ALTERED BEAST BEGINS

I had been friends with Deano since he was 13 or so. We'd been going to the same Punx Picnics. I met Tristan around early 2002 and he liked some of the same music I liked at the time (Magnacite, Subversion) so we started a band. Kipp Wood worked at Utopia Records at the time so I randomly asked him to play bass. 

Admittedly, the band's influences were a little too varied and we suffered from the dilution of styles. On hindsight, I wish we had been a straight-up grind/powerviolence band. At first we practiced at Thunderdome (name given to Hornsby hardcore vocalist Fingers' house) but after I got teased so much - the typical stuff when you get a bunch of 20-year-old bros together - we moved to Zen Studios.

PLAYING THE SCENE

The level of inclusivity in the punk scene back then was complex. I was in the noise and metal scene too - metal has its racism and misogyny out in the open, so you know what you're getting into. Punk could be (and still is) disguised with virtue signalling and the right dogmatic language regarding feminism, anti-racism, and being queer-friendly... but it cloaks the same kind of white supremacy you find elsewhere. If I joined the bros doing dumb aggressive pranks I was told by these skater/hardcore bros that I was being rude or shitty - because they didn't expect or want rowdiness from a young Asian girl because it challenged their stereotypes and expectations, as well as their own masculinity, haha. I also got pointed criticism for playing in bands but the criticism was fetishizing and super racialised. Like, I was told that, in Altered Beast, I was exploiting my sexuality as an Asian femme by the way I was holding the microphone... but I was an Autistic goober who was largely asexual and also holding the mic the way anyone holds the mic. There was also the typical well-meaning comments when we played at The Lansdowne or The Harp or wherever, "Whoah for an Asian chick, you're pretty good!" So you know, you get accidentally microaggressed or blasted from all genders and all parts of the punk scene for being opinionated, loud, and/or visible as a brown person.

I think it's important that people understand the trappings of how visible black, Indigenous, or other people of colour in punk and metal have to deal with what people project onto them, even if it's not at all what they're about or who they are. And how in Australia this is deeply racialised and needs examination. 

I found my crew a few years later with other badass brown femme musicians who were also getting the same sort of critique from white femme punks. We rolled deep for years before I moved to Berlin in 2009. The noise scene was hella chill and inclusive though - you could be whoever you wanted there.

Altered Beast played many shows - some really weird ones too, across different scenes. We would play with emo and screamo bands, or with touring hardcore or grind bands. The grind bands were my favourite shows - Captain Cleanoff, etc. The most mismtached and un-DIY shows were with professional pop punk and local stoner rock bands at places like the Sandringham and Manning Bar. I booked a lot of shows but Tristan and Kipp would organise shows too.

Crowd at one of the 'Maroubra Underground' gigs, 1997

THE MONSTROUS SUBLIME EP

We recorded with Geoff at Zen Studio. He was a grumpy old dude that liked very normal music. We had our six songs and he was very gracious about letting me mix alongside him in real time and taking all my suggestions very seriously. I own the dorky mistake of wanting to do singing vocals on those recordings! I was absolutely terrified of recording and had to ask everyone to leave the room when I sang (except for Geoff). After we recorded, I started singing these bits like as well - before that I did it more in a spoken-word fashion. I cringe now when I listen to it. I heard from Shortty that when I was living in Mexico the band played a show without me and then a bunch of people stood in for vocals and sang all the singy pretty parts, which were lyrics about my grandma ageing. So it's fun that people seemed to connect to those singy lyrics, even my broey-est friends. 

The name of the EP was going to be Vagina Dentata but my bandmates were too awkward to say the name of it so we called The Monstrous Sublime, which comes from the same feminist theoretical framework. I had the idea of printing the covers in two layers - a black-and-white photocopy on acetate that was translucent, which then revealed an image underneath. I then sewed the covers out of netting in black-and-white, and hand-sewed them shut so that people had to unpick them or break the seal to listen to it. I started a Black Metal label called An Out Recordings a couple of years later and hand-sewed a bunch of these covers because I really like the idea of analog touches on vinyl and cassette releases, etc. That label was in response to all the antisemitic and weird racist Black Metal bands in Australia at the time. 

END OF THE BAND

There was a second recording in 2005 that I played guitar on. It kind of broke up the band because some folks didn't want to release it unless my guitars were deleted off one particular song. So it was never released! And then we never played again because it was kind of awkward. 

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