New Album, Skin & Bones, Online Now

...And as a pay-what-you-want download! How great! Check it out!

And now, read more about it:

A little more than a year ago, I decided I wanted to learn the piano. I knew some chords and I could string together simple songs but I wanted to understand the piano. On my quest to learn music theory, I began working on a number of songs and after months of longing to record them, I finally got my act together and made a little record.

The album is called Skin & Bones and is available on my Bandcamp now, as a pay-what-you-want download.

This record was eagerly anticipated by at least one person and has been called "texture-licious" by one of my facebook friends. When I started piecing together my lo-fi piano songs, I realized it would be interesting to make them sound as if they were the old 78 recordings of a seance played through a haunted Victrola. That means this album contains field recordings of night meadows, wailing sirens, and television static. There are samples taken from youtube videos of alleged poltergeists, cartoons from the 1940's, the unauthorized biography of Karen Carpenter, and more.

I recorded it using an iPod touch, mostly in a basement. I mixed it using some very, uh, lo-tech software. A lot of times, I recorded my vocals and piano from across the room, trying to utilize the hum of the humidifier, the creaking of the pipes, the atmosphere to be found within the supposed silence of nighttime in suburbia.

The instruments played on this record are varied, from a thrift store keyboard to an out of tune, upright, 97 keyed monster. There are toy pianos, hand wound music boxes, ukulele and a questionably played electric violin. But more important than what made up this record is the content. These songs are as haunted as they sound, strewn with the ghosts of my relatives, doppelgangers of men I used to love, and the memories that make up the bones of the skeletons in my closet. There are even ghosts of melodies from unrecorded older material nestled within the ten songs on the album itself.

So take a half hour and check out the spooky sounds I made. 'Tis the season!

Happy Halloween~