A&P Flood Damage Equipment Replacement

A&P Friends,

UPDATE!! We've reached the goal in just 9 hours. Thank you all so much! It's an amazing community that is still mainly DIY and this proves it...it warms my heathen heart :). Anything additional that is donated will be given to the https://www.gofundme.com/f/flood-recovery-for-k-street-kreative-studios for K St Kreative Studio to rebuild the actual studio. The cost to rebuild is immense so anything donated will be used to rebuild. It is a shared space for around 20 local musicians, artists and makers and all walls and floors need to be ripped out and replaced as well as swap out some crucial gear that was underwater.

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I've never had to ask for something like this, but here goes. On Monday morning 1/22/24 my studio that is part of the K St Kreative Studios in South San Diego was overrun by waist high flood water that rushed in and flooded the whole building, including the neighbors, businesses, houses and cars. This neighborhood has been hit with flooding before due to years of negligence by the city of San Diego in not maintaining and updating storm drains. The K St collective went as far as updating all doors and adding barriers, but the rain came down too fast and the water was simply too high...so high in fact the transformer out front was under water and blew up sending smoke and steam everywhere. We were lucky no one was hurt.

There are multiple practice spaces, artist spaces, a few small businesses and a collective recording studio that some of us pay into monthly to use. It's a beautiful and rare space that we value highly. I recorded Beastland, Kruller, filmed Nihil Strength and have built, designed, and tested most of the new Drone Machines in this space over the past 6 years. Everything was underwater including the control room, mics, amplifiers, rack gear, everyones's music gear in their rooms and equipment related to the small businesses.

Luckily all of my Drone Machines were either mounted to my tables or in closed and sealed pelican cases. When it was safe to enter the building, we waded in through the water and the cases were floating but no water got in. This was very lucky, since I had just designed and built a new set which would have been devastating to lose. Sadly though, my amp rack, new mixer, subs, countless cables, pedals, a couple keyboards were all submerged. After the water finally receded, the entire building needed to be emptied to begin cutting out the dry wall to prevent mold. Thanks to the many amazing volunteers that came down to help, we began emptying out the building and dragging the equipment out, all covered in muddy, likely toxic water. I moved all of my gear that survived to a storage facility and we'll see what happens next as it dries out.

My business insurance denied my claim, saying that it was a natural disaster and that flood water coming in from the OUTSIDE of the building is not covered. I estimated about $7k in losses from submerged electronics, but I am willing and able to absorb most of the losses, but with a tour coming up next month, I don't have a working sound system to rehearse as I've lost my main power amps as well as a brand new mixer and possibly my subwoofers and most of the interconnect and speaker cables. The money I am humbly asking for will help rebuild this system to a minimal state to get back on track and take some of the sting out of this painful week. I plan to downsize so that any future climate related events will be easier to "weather".

In addition to this request, there are countless others that are in need in the neighborhood, if you are able to help, especially K St Kreative Studios:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/flood-recovery-for-k-street-kreative-studios

and more

https://sandiegomagazine.com/everything-sd/flood-relief-fundraisers/

Much love from me to you, hopefully we'll rebuild and drone on...

Tristan