When she found out about her friend’s death, Velazquez spent the entire day painting and making stencils of Ikey’s iconic smile. It adorns the back wall on the stage at Que Sera to this day.

“He was just this heavy mentor and this conduit … he had a magic to him from the get-go,” she said. “He saw things in people and brought the bigger out of it. He was a good channel for that and made me realize this is what I want to be doing.”

Last February, about four months after Ikey’s passing, keyboardist Jacob Connelly had heard Velazquez was writing songs and reached out about jamming. Connelly, who met Ikey in front of a bookstore in 2006, never really considered himself as a musician. Through mutual friends, they ended up “talking life over a blunt” and listening to Connelly’s recordings.

“He’d sit there and listen to these mixes,” Connelly recalled, “and he’d say, ‘I know the sound of your room.'”

A few months in, drummer Ryan Reiff heard some recordings by Velazquez and Connelly and wanted in. Reiff met Ikey in 2005 when he was playing in a psychedelic instrumental band with Jesse Carzello (Bobby Blunders). Ikey heard the group and occasionally sat in with them. Eventually when Ikey decided to transition his bedroom project Free Moral Agents into a full live band, he recruited Reiff to join the team. The group was active for some seven years and released two full-length albums.

Velazquez, Connelly and Reiff briefly played as a trio under the name TAJAR but not for long. Guitarist Miguel Vazquez entered the picture as the last piece of the puzzle. His first encounter with Ikey came when he produced Vazquez’s band Wild Pack of Canaries. They started working on other projects together, engineering in Vazquez’s studio and making bass fuzz and oscillator pedals for Free Moral Agents.