You may have seen her sporting knee high clunky boots or painting murals in the hallway. To most East students, Charlotte Suplee (‘27) is just another face at East. To the hardcore music community nationwide, she’s the girl searching for her mother’s lost demo tape – and they’re all trying to help her find it.
The demo tape is the last artifact remaining of her mother’s hardcore band Seed originating in South Jersey. Her mother, Shannon Astor, was the main vocalist at just 14 years old, sparking Charlotte’s fascination for her mother’s past. Seed fizzled out after two years, but not before producing one recording demo at Wildfire Records around 1994. Charlotte has been searching for it ever since.
“Today, not a trace of this band exists… it’s like it vanished into thin air. I have been looking for this demo tape since I was old enough to form a conscious thought,” said Suplee. “One night, I was bored out of my mind and thought, screw it, I should make a post asking for people to check around and see if they know anything about my mom’s old demo. Well, that post went viral overnight, and NJ.com reached out a day or so later and wanted to look into the Jersey hardcore subculture and me as a straightedge photographer in the exact same scene my mother grew up in.”
The search became a phenomenon within the tight-knit hardcore community. For weeks fans across the country from Southern California to Connecticut searched their basements and boxes for the tape. The closest Suplee has found so far was a scratchy rehearsal tape a former band member made on a boombox decades ago.
Her mother’s creative spunk is what pushed Suplee to not only uncover her teenage past, but to forge her own identity within the same world. Suplee is part of the “straight-edge” community – a subculture of people in the hardcore punk scene centered on abstaining from alcohol and recreational drugs. She is a regular at venues like the Triangle Club in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where she is often seen photographing shows on her Nikon FE while dancing and singing with the crowd.
Between classes at East, Suplee has become both a participant and a documentarian of the New Jersey hardcore scene. Her camera captures the raw energy of mosh pits and stage dives, but she is not just an observer and will not hesitate to grab the microphone and sing along.
“Art and photography are kind of like a snapshot in time, like freezing something exactly as I saw it in my life… I have narcolepsy [and] I spent a lot of my life sorta out of it at times. Photography, especially at gigs, is one of the few things that keeps me awake at that moment,” said Suplee.
Suplee aims to educate people on the straight edge community and break down the misconceptions. At East, she has painted a 6-by-10-foot mural in front of the auditorium depicting a straight edge concert to introduce others to her world.
Charlotte has collected all of these aspects of her life together from her photographs to her own personal art into her own zine, “Through Our Eyes” – produced using the East printer. The zine is a collection of her own photography, interviews with bands, articles co-written by musicians and artists, and her own art. She even stapled the first edition together between classes.
“First two issues sold out, and I am almost done drafting up the third,” said Suplee.
Looking ahead, Charlotte plans to apply to art and design schools with hopes of becoming an illustrator in music design – creating album art, merchandise, and possibly even demo tape covers. For now, her focus remains on her creative work and the cassette tape that is still waiting to be found.
“I’m certain someone in New Jersey has that tape,” Suplee told NJ.com. “I’m not giving up.”
Faith • Dec 16, 2025 at 3:02 am
Charli is awesome at what she does! That’s my band God Instinct in the first photo of the gallery. She’s the best in the game. I really hope someone has this demo tape for her!!!! ❤️