Music
As I say elsewhere on this site, music is the reason I got into design in the first place, so it was only a matter of time before I started making my own. I’ve had countless bands and solo projects over the last three decades, but I’m only sharing the least embarrassing ones here.
GOLDEN FEELINGS
Golden Feelings is my most recent solo project, started in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. For the most part, this is honest-to-Yod new age “healing music”, based around swirls of consonant, asynchronous synth pads, guitar, and the like, and all tuned to the “chakra-aligning” frequency of 432 hz.
Yep, sounds like a pivot a musician would make when their brain is broken from a global pandemic! In all seriousness, though, this is almost certainly the best music I’ve ever made. People have told me it has helped them in myriad ways — whether it be focusing at work or navigating a mushroom trip! — and the tours have been almost entirely a joy.
SKIN LIES
The last Skin Lies show, meanwhile, happened less than a week before COVID lockdowns started. This is another mostly-solo project I started in 2014. There are structural similarities with the Golden Feelings music, but it is largely (though not entirely) a more noisy, tense, or dissonant music. My goals were the same, but I wasn’t ready to get rid of the noise albatross just yet.
I think some of these recordings would really benefit from a remix and remaster, but I’ve been too busy and probably don’t have most of the master files/tapes anyway.
"SOME OLD BULLSHIT"
I imply above that I come from noise music, and that’s largely true. Mall Mutants was me at my most abstract and gunky, heavily under the influence of Smegma, Blood Stereo, Aaron Dilloway, Lejaren Hiller, John Cage, et al. I love this stuff, but I think I’m one of three people in the universe who feels that way. Anyway, I had a blast making it.
I’ve also played in several good old-fashioned rock & roll bands, Blood Necklace (in Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti) and Forever Stoked (in Portland) being my favorites of the lot. Both bands’ recordings desperately need to be remastered and given better cover art, but I still enjoy these songs.
I’m leaving one of my longest-running projects, Actual Birds, off here because I find most of it embarrassing and cutesy, the product of a sheltered boy-man unschooled in the ways of the world. That said, 2006’s Vive La Fantastique! Avec Actual Birds & Friends features some inspired 4-track production by my favorite living songwriter Fred Thomas, so it’s worth a listen even as it makes me cringe. It’s not on Bandcamp, but it is on all streamers and YouTube.