By Laura Latzko, Pasadena Weekly Staff Writer
Sep 4, 2025 Updated Sep 11, 2025
During the Los Angeles fires, Dan Voznick of the ’80s post-punk band Afterimage lost his home and nearly all of his belongings, including musical instruments. Through the Instrumental Giving registry, he received new instruments and equipment.
With the Instrumental Giving registry, musicians can list gear and instruments they have lost, and donors are able to help them to replace these items. The organization was founded by Brandon Jay and Gwendolyn Sanford, music composers who lost their home, studio and all but two of their instruments in the Eaton Fire.
Through Instrumental Giving, Voznick has received a Gibson Explorer donated by Art Alexakis of Everclear, an upgraded Silvertone acoustic parlor-size guitar, two Shure SM57 mics, effect pedals and a practice amp.
His son acquired a trumpet, and his wife received a violin.
Voznick has also helped to connect others to the registry.
“It’s been a really tremendous resource. I went down to the warehouse where they were storing the instruments they were going to give way. There was a ton of stuff. They had an open house weekend thing, and they helped a lot of people,” Voznick said.
Voznick said he can make music again, with some limitations.
“I did lose a lot, but I’m not hurting. I have stuff to work with. We live in a place that’s half the size of what we used to have, so we’re crammed in here. The space to work is the thing that I lack now,” Voznick said.
When they evacuated, Voznick and his son could only take a carload of items.
“I saved a few guitars and my computer, and that was it. One car full of stuff, including clothes and my son’s stuff. I just didn’t expect it because when the fire started, it was so far from my house… It went up into the hills and then came back down. Our neighborhood was like a bomb hit it…Even now, it happened to me, but it’s hard to comprehend really,” Voznick said.
Voznick said that they initially packed up and evacuated just as a precaution.
“I didn’t want to evacuate, and I didn’t think I needed to because it was so far away. I did realize if I was going to stay, I was going to have to stay up all night, just in case. My wife was out of town at the time. She was on the phone, and she was very worried…So, I packed up the car with as much stuff as I could take… Even when I was on the freeway, I looked at the fire. It was still in the small, little area right near Eaton Canyon. It hadn’t grown yet. It was about 10 o’clock or 10:30 when I left. I went to my brother’s house. We went to sleep, and the next morning, the neighborhood was gone,” Voznick said.
“I didn’t have a lot of angst at the time because I didn’t think it was going to happen. It was more of an inconvenience. ‘What do I have to take?’ I took some of our legal documents, our passports, my computers. I did take a couple of guitars, clothes, my son’s stuff. I asked him what he wanted to take. We took our dog. My wife wasn’t there, so we only had one car full of stuff, and that was it.”
Voznick said that he lost around 50 guitars, old tapes from the ’80s and ’90s, microphones, recording equipment and original master recordings from Afterimage and solo work.
“I had a lot of artwork, a lot of master recordings, a lot of practice tapes and rehearsal tapes, those kind of tapes that have ideas on them. Often, that’s where you get your impetus….All of that stuff is gone. I had some records that I put out independently on my own. I had the back catalogue of what was left over, that I hadn’t sold yet, under the house. That’s all gone, including the copies I was saving for my children,” Voznick said.
Some of the guitars that he lost had great sentimental value to him.
“There was a couple instruments that my parents gave to me when I was younger. I lost those… The guitar player from Afterimage, he passed away in 2012, and I bought his guitar from his wife because I wanted to keep it. I lost that one,” Voznick said.
He also lost artwork he had created as a student at UCLA in the 1970s until about 10 years ago.
He had photographed the artwork, so he has some record of it, but the originals are gone.
He also lost photographs he had taken as a student and young man.
He said the loss of his artwork and music has really begun to sink in recently. He had been hoping to share his work with his three children, a son who is 10 and two older children in their 20s.
“In some ways, you don’t miss it that much because you never looked at it that much anyway. But then if I think about it. I would have liked my kids to see this and know this about me,” Voznick said. “I don’t know if they would have been interested in my record collection, my book collection, my photos of this different time. Maybe when they got older, they might have been.”
His family also lost everyday items such as tools, kitchen gadgets and clothes. He said others have really helped him and his family during the rebuilding process.
“There were a few weeks where I was wearing almost all borrowed, donated clothes. Even though I took some with me, I just took an overnight bag of a few things. Outreach has been for me really amazing, the amount of people who put themselves out for us,” Voznick said.
Currently, Voznick and his family are living in temporary housing while they are going through the rebuilding and architectural planning process.
They are living between Highland Park and Downtown LA, about 12 to 13 miles from their old home.
“You can’t just immediately start building again. You’ve got to go through the whole process and then wait for it to happen. That’s hardest part. And while still trying to have a normal life,” Voznick said.
“We’re trying to deal with insurance, getting plans together to rebuild, keep in touch with friends in old our neighborhood who are also going through all of this process. And there’s a lot of them. When we got our house in Altadena, we put on an addition….This is way more complicated than doing an addition, and that took about nine months.”
Voznick works full-time in marketing for a company that sells water filtration products. He plays music in his spare time.
Voznick was the frontman for Afterimage, an early post-punk band. They were part of LA’s underground scene in the early ’80s.
They played and recorded at major spots in LA, including Whiskey a Go-Go.
There were a couple of years when we played a lot. There were many places to play back then. It was a very exciting time,” Voznick said. “Unfortunately, I know I was like this, and maybe others were, too. I took it for granted. I didn’t really realize that it was unique and wouldn’t last. I thought that’s just the way things were,” Voznick said.
Voznick remained with Afterimage through various versions of the group. The original lineup lasted about two and a half years.
“It was just me really. I became Afterimage, and the other guys didn’t really participate at all. A Produce, the guitar player, we remained friends….He had a bunch of releases in the ambient, trance field of music. We’d talk, but we really never worked much together after that grouping. I retired the Afterimage name around 2000,” Voznick said.
After working with Afterimage, Voznick was in a few other bands. He had been working on some new music around the time of the fires, but he hasn’t gotten back to it yet.
“It was more just instrumental music. I still hope to put out more music… I’m grateful that these guys put instruments back in my hand, so I don’t feel like I’m cut off from the things that interest me. I can still play my guitar and at least dream about making some music. Eventually, I’ll get around to that,” Voznick said.
A lot of Afterimage’s early work has survived in digital formats.
Several years ago, Voznick began to work with Bruce Licher ofI. Independent Project Records to reissue music from Afterimage’s catalogue.
It was released in October 2024 as the 22-track retrospective compilation “Faces to Hide,” which features music from the original lineup.
As part of this project, they digitized, mixed and remastered previously released and unreleased music.
“It was real blessing of timing that we went through that because we did go through a lot of tapes and digitized them… That period of time has been pretty well documented now… This process to make this record has made it so that we didn’t lose that material,” Voznick said.
They were able to uncover some material from Afterimage’s early days.
“We went through it and listened to the earliest rehearsal tapes. One of the things he dug out, I had totally forgotten about it. We covered a Sex Pistols song in early rehearsals because we were just trying to get to know each other and play some music that we could play… We ended up putting it on this release….It has every recording worth listening to from that time period, including the rough ones,” Voznick said.
The new “Faces to Hide” compilation is available at independentprojectrecords.com.