The Misery Club member talks rock-and-rolling in Pennsylvania, meeting Wicca Phase Springs Eternal on Tumblr, pivoting to vocals, and much more
From the seclusion of a wooded home in small-town Pennsylvania, Fantasy Camp details the ruthlessness of his streets. “If I’m walking in real late at night and I hear a random noise I’ll get spooked,” the multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and producer confesses, alluding of the threat of bears lurking in the area of his aptly named town, Bear Creek. Fortunately, he is able to reassure himself that the furry beasts are more interested in eating garbage than the 23-year-old Misery Club member. Born Jonah Kramer, Fantasy Camp is also blessed with the protective forces of his girlfriend, a visual artist, and their rescue cat, Toast. While he must take a prescription decongestant to share a home with the personable feline, he claims the trouble is more than worth it. “I was never a cat person, but he’s definitely changed my mind.”
It is through this type of insular environment in Hamburg, Pennsylvania that Kramer grew up. “You know everyone you go to school with for your entire life,” he says of his time there. Disinterested with the community pastimes of hunting and sports, he sought to carve out his own creative outlet in spite of the only local venue being a Veteran’s Hall. With the hope of establishing music-based connections, a young Kramer took to YouTube to post guitar covers of famous songs with the twist being “performed by a 10-year-old.” While he wasn’t able to network as much as he had hoped, he learned an important lesson about developing a thick skin. “If you want to put your art out into the world, you got to be prepared for all kinds of feedback; things are subjective and not everyone is going to like what you’re doing.” Nevertheless, Kramer was always met with unconditional support from his father—a breakdancer who is known to “bust out the cardboard” at parties—as well as his sister who accompanied him to nu metal shows in Redding.
As his tastes gradually shifted from the likes of Slipknot to Hawthorne Heights, Bayside, and Silverstein, a close-in-age cousin of Kramer became his “partner in crime.” “We were on MySpace all day trying to find new bands,” he says of their companionship. “It was sort of like a competition, like, ‘Oh, have you heard this band?'” The pair stuck together as they went against the tide of school, rivaling each other only in the tightness of their pants. Skateboarding became their anti-sport and torn-up sneakers were emblems representing how hard they would go.
Even as Kramer graduated high school and ventured out to college, he hardly let the influence of youth culture slip away. He began drumming in his grunge-inspired band, Westpoint, and transferred to a school in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania – a midway point between Philadelphia and New York, with roots running deep in alternative music. “I just wanted to go to school up here so we could keep doing the band because that was kind of like my five-year plan,” he recalls. “I’m going to go to school, my band is going to get huge, and we’re just going to tour once I get done. That didn’t happen, obviously.”
Yet, throughout much of his life, Kramer was quietly dabbling into a different kind of music entirely: beat-making. “That was always a huge part of what I was doing [even though] a lot of people just didn’t really understand it in the world of music I was in,” he says. As a fan of Tigers Jaw from nearby Scranton, he asked to send beats to guitarist and vocalist Adam McIlwee – the artist who would become Wicca Phase Springs Eternal. Their friendship prompted collaborations with GothBoiClique, as well as Kramer’s own collective, Misery Club (comprised of Wicca Phase, Lil Zubin, Jon Simmons, and Fantasy Camp, as well as producers Nedarb, and Foxwedding.)
As Kramer’s collaborators encouraged his interest in performing his own vocals over his beats, he blossomed into a solo artist of his own. A self-proclaimed creature of routine reared equally by the intricacies of local legacies and the vastness of the internet, he reflects on how he became the Fantasy Camp we know today.
How did beat-making come about for you?
I got FL Studio for my 14th birthday in 2010. I asked for it because I had been running a demo version of it. I don’t even really remember why I downloaded it in the first place. I loved the production aspect of it, but I didn’t really understand that you could make beats from home without a huge studio with a bunch of equipment. Once I realized that you could download a program on your computer that’s all I wanted to do, especially since I was stuck in Hamburg with no one to make music with. I was like, until I get to go somewhere and make music with people, I want to make music in some way. That was kind of my outlet for that.
For like the first year or two, I was just making really shitty boom-bap beats, like old school-sounding stuff. I would take acapella from popular rap songs and put them over my beats, and I would release mixtapes, but I was always really into sampling and putting synth over them and stuff, too. So, I guess it kind of still is a big part of the production I’m doing now. It’s always been sort of the same. I just spent all my time trying to get better at making beats and figuring out how to use the program.
Were you able to find anyone else who was into beat-making or more electronic kinds of stuff, or were most of your friends still playing in traditional band formats?
Well, I mean at that point I had, like, no musician friends. Some kids at my high school who knew about it were supportive of it and just thought it was interesting, I guess. It wasn’t until I started being on Tumblr a lot that I could find people to send beats to. That’s pretty much how Wicca Phase and I started working. That wasn’t until 2012, so like two years [after I got FL Studio]. He had released one song and it was a re-work of that Lana Del Rey song, “Born To Die.” I was like oh shit, this is something that I could produce. Like, I could make beats with that kind of sound. I started sending beats to him and he was in a band at the time [Tigers Jaw] that was one of my favorite bands, so I was already fanning super hard and was just so stoked that he wanted to work with me. At that point, every beat I made was sent to him.
How exactly did you find each other on Tumblr?
You know how you could ask someone a question? He was pretty active with that and he would answer questions. I just asked if I could send him beats and I would imagine I was probably either the first or second person to ask him that, so he was down immediately. Then we ended up doing a whole mixtape together [called #Feb13]. That was like his first full-length project. That was crazy to me, and it still is. I’ve always looked up to him and thought that he was an amazing artist, so I was just mind-blown that it was happening. We didn’t even really actually meet until probably like six months to one year after we had started working.
There was a Tigers Jaw show in Wilkes-Barre. I just emailed him and told him I was going to be there. We met and talked for a little bit and that was kind of it for a while, but then we started hanging out a little bit more later on. That was the first time we met, and I don’t think I’d ever disclosed to him my age at the time, so that was pretty weird for him. He was just like, what the fuck, I had no idea you were like a 16-year-old still in high school. The videos of the show [where we met] are super funny because you can see me stage diving and stuff. Someone actually found one recently. They were just watching old Tigers Jaw videos and they spotted me in the crowd and Tweeted it at me.
You guys have been collaborating for longer than a lot of other people in the scene.
Yeah, it was a weird time. It was before SoundCloud was even a huge thing. It was all Bandcamp and Tumblr. Tumblr was a huge thing for underground music and aesthetic artists. There just wasn’t much of it. There weren’t too many people to work with. It was a cool time, like before anyone really cared. There wasn’t a huge audience for it so you could be as experimental and weird as you wanted it to be, which I was really drawn to. That’s definitely what was inspiring me to keep doing it.
Do you ever miss those times at all?
Yeah, sort of. It’s cooler now because we can actually tour and play shows and people are responding to it, but there are certain things about it that I miss. I feel like everyone was more experimental and was trying to do more to stand out instead of trying to do something that could possibly appeal to the mainstream or get them signed to a record label or something. It’s definitely a lot different now that there’s a huge audience for this type of music. There are benefits and cool stuff and there’s the stuff that I wish was different.
What was college like for you when you were trying to manage school and music?
College was weird because I was doing the band a lot. The beats were just kind of a thing that I was doing on the side. But basically, I’d go to school five days a week and not really do shit those five days and then on the weekends I’d come to Wilkes-Barre and either do a show or practice or hang out with my friends. I didn’t really have friends at the college I went to. Most of the time when I was there, I was just by myself chilling in my dorm either doing beats or on the internet.
What made you want to keep going with your education?
I didn’t really see any success in music until the last year and a half of college. I think it was the last semester of my third year when I started touring, and it was super difficult because there were tours during the school year that I had to turn down. But I had already finished so much of it and spent so much money that I just knew that I would have been super bummed and upset with myself if I had quit. That’s kind of my personality – if I start something, I have to finish it.
No one in my family has ever finished school. Most of them never even went in the first place, but everyone who has gone hasn’t completed it, so I felt like my family was looking at me like You’re going to be the first one to do this. I felt like I would have been letting them down. Even though they would have kept supporting me, I knew it was something I had to do. I went through a period of time where I was asking all my music friends like ‘should I just drop out, or should I go for it?’ Luckily, a lot of them told me to do whatever I want, but that missing one tour wasn’t going to be the end of the world. There would be more tours.
At what point did Fantasy Camp emerge?
Well, I’ve always used the name Fantasy Camp for my beats starting with the Wicca Phase production. Then I started doing vocals in 2016, 2017. That was just because I had so many beats that weren’t really being used and when I was making them, I was kind of hearing melodies in my head. It was something that I always wanted to do but was never confident enough for. Something just changed where I was like fuck it, I don’t care. Even if people hate this it’s just something I want to do. I started recording vocals and I’d send them to all of my music friends I had through production to get their feedback on it. I did that for probably six months. I had all these songs and then obviously, you know, the first stuff you make isn’t the best and then you get better at it. You figure out what is best for recording your voice and then you improve.
I never released those early songs. Once I got to the point where I was comfortable, I started putting songs on SoundCloud. I was way too ambitious with my first project, One For Sorrow. It was a full-length mixtape with 10 songs. I’ve always just been a fan of the tradition of putting out a full-length project, even though that’s not the way the world works now. It’s more single-oriented. I just like putting out an album and listening to the whole thing. People were always super kind and supportive about it. Wicca, Zubin, and Jon [Simmons] – those are the people I’ve been working with from the beginning and they were always down to get on songs with me. That also pushed me to keep doing it.
Can you pinpoint a time where you really started gaining traction?
There was a time the summer before last where Zubin and I were going to all of these label meetings and we were traveling so much. We were in New York and we were in L.A. for a while. Then we went to London with Nedarb and all of this stuff was happening. I was still in school. It was the summer after my third year was finished. That felt crazy. Things were becoming serious. Obviously, we ended up not doing anything with the labels, but it was just crazy that these rich music executives knew who we were, and we could potentially be rich off of music if we wanted to go that route. We could try to do this weird pop star lifestyle. That wasn’t really ever what we wanted, but it was just crazy that those kinds of people were watching.
Other than that, the first song that people responded to that got decent plays was “With Or Without You.” Obviously, a lot of that had to do with Wicca being on the track, but I definitely feel like it was the best song I’ve written, and the best beat I’ve made. That was the first song that people were into. That was the best feeling and I just wanted to keep doing that and keep making songs that I thought people would respond to.
Was it ever intimidating to go from being a beatmaker / band member to a full-fledged solo artist?
I was always the drummer in bands, so I’ve always been in the background. It was never the ‘all eyes on me’ type of thing. That isn’t something I’m really into. I don’t like that aspect of it. I think the scariest part was that the scene I was involved in [in Wilkes-Barre] was all rock and roll music – it’s hardcore, it’s punk, it’s alternative, it’s grunge. No one I knew was a fan of this kind of music. It was always just something I had done on the side.
Obviously, once I started doing Fantasy Camp more seriously people were going to see it and either they were going to support me, which my closest friends did, or they were going to talk shit, and a lot of people did that, too. I made a conscious decision to not let the music I make become a popularity contest for me. I’m not trying to be liked by every single person. If I keep holding myself back out of fear of what people are going to say about me in their group chats, I’m never going to be fulfilled. I just accepted what was going to happen, and I chose not to care.
What made you return to almost a band-like setting with your collective, Misery Club?
That was just sort of something that happened. None of us planned for it. We just decided to make songs together. At the same time, Zubin was like ‘Hey, let’s start a little group that we can label ourselves as.’ That’s what Misery Club is. Even before we had the first Misery Club release, I was putting Misery Club on my single art and stuff like that. I have it on my socials and stuff. Then we made our first EP [Club Misery] and we had to call it something. We decided it was the best thing to do. There’s always something appealing about being in a group and that one made perfect sense because it’s all of these people I’ve been working with and been friends with since the beginning. I feel like we’re all on the same wavelength and we get along super well, so it just makes sense.
It’s interesting how collectives almost become bigger than themselves, especially when fans start repping them.
It’s crazy that there are people who can become a fan of something and not even know who the individual people involved are. They just attach themselves to this group name and what it represents through the music. People are constantly asking me if we’re doing new stuff. We didn’t plan for the first release and the second one just kind of naturally happened, too. When we’re all able to work together we do, but we try not to force anything.
I have some of my best memories just doing stuff with them. We’ve only played one show and it was probably my most favorite show that I’ve done. Every time we hang out it’s so fun. I wish we could do it more but it’s hard because we’re all split. They’re just my closest friends in music and I think we make great music together. We all have something different we do in songs. It’s just a fun project that takes you outside of your own thing. You can get really bogged down just doing solo stuff all the time, so I think it’s important to have stuff like that.
You’ve been prolific with releasing lately. With Disconnect, what made you put out those songs now?
Basically, I had been sitting on those songs for so long. They span the entire time that I’ve been doing this, and they didn’t really have a place on any of the other projects. Now I’m gearing up to release two EPs and I just figured that if I don’t release these songs now, they’ll probably never come out. They are songs that I’m proud of and I like, but it’s easy for things to get lost. One day I just went through my phone and went through all the files on my computer and was just like holy shit, I have so many songs I never released. I just wanted them out there, so I thought it would be a good time to do it before these ‘proper’ releases come out.
The first is an EP produced by Nedarb called Things Fall Apart. We started recording it when we were in London, which was two summers ago. So, some of the songs were recorded there and some of the songs were finished afterward just through email. I’m stoked that it’s finally coming out.
What inspired this EP thematically?
It’s honestly somewhat of a darker EP. There’s a lot of stuff about being away from home for so long because there was this period of time where it felt like I hadn’t been home in months. For someone who hadn’t really done that before, it put me in a really weird space. It was just my way of dealing with that. There are a lot of themes of being homesick and feeling like you’re always so far away. There’s like the usual themes that you can find in most of my music as well, but a lot of it was inspired by that time. I had never been to London before and I was there with Zubin and Nedarb and that was it. I didn’t know anyone else. We were there doing some songwriting stuff, writing for a different artist. We ended up having leftover time in the studio where we could do whatever we wanted, so we just started working on our own shit. Some of it made its way onto Zubin and mine’s EP [Light Went Out].
What has pushed you into writing highly emotive music?
When I’m around people, I try to be a very funny, happy-go-lucky person. I think that’s always been my way of connecting with people and being comfortable in social situations. Because of that, I’m not really comfortable talking to really anyone about negative feelings or stuff that I’m going through. It was just a really good outlet for me to speak unapologetically about things that I’m feeling. I’ve found out that a lot of people feel the same way. It’s just a way for me to vent. It sounds corny, but it’s a form of therapy. I’m sure a lot of artists say something similar to that. If things are going really good for me, I might not have something to write about for a while – then I just make beats!