From First To Last: Richter Scales

TRAVIS RICHTER may have been pushed out of FROM FIRST TO LAST, but he’s hardly sitting on his couch crying, or issuing bitter denunciations of his former bandmates on Facebook. He’s got a couple of projects in the works, both in the rock arena and in the bass-heavy electronic subgenre known as dubstep. “I’m producing for this group based out of Orlando, Florida, called Modified Noise, [and they’re] gonna be playing Detroit at a really big event called Dubstep Circus,” he says. “I’m really pumped on that. That’s probably been my biggest focus. Even the last year-and-a-half I was in From First To Last, I was doing dubstep with Modified Noise on my laptop while on the road.”

But–as we exclusively reported–Richter has also landed a new gig with a rock band: The progressive-metal group THE HUMAN ABSTRACT–who shared stages with FFTL on the 2008 Take Action! Tour–recently parted ways with vocalist Nathan Ells, and they’ve tapped Richter as his replacement. “I went through a tryout process, and now I’m here writing with the band,” he says from the group’s rehearsal space in Los Angeles. “I think it’s pretty set in stone. It’s a really big challenge writing for the Human Abstract, because the music is so technical. It’s a lot of time-signature changes and fancy stuff I’ll probably never understand, but I pick up on the feeling of it, for sure. I’ll sit in the vocal booth with my laptop, playing songs over and over and over to pick up on all the intricacies of the music. I know all their records, and this new stuff is musically out there. It’s awesome.” —Phil Freeman