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Tracks was the first album that we did that I really felt was really cohesive and solid from beginning to end. Done during the period of time while Cory Goodwin was still playing with us regularly, you can really hear a lot of Cory’s amazing and crazy sonic experiments. I also heavily used an awesome effects pedal on my voice and played around with odd ways to warp the sound of my voice. I often remember times where Cory, Neil and Jeremy would somehow find just the perfect mixture of sound textures in a way where I’d just have to stop and listen.

As to lyrics during this period, many of the songs didn’t have them. I’d just make something up off the top of my head and go with it. At first, I was just jamming out vocalizations, making crazy sounds and things. Just using vocals for additional instrumentation and having fun with it. Sometimes, I’d get ideas going in my head and maybe come up with a story or a scene and just describe it as it ran through my head at the time.

This way of singing led to Track 5, which was the first semi-solid song we really did. It was initially dubbed, “The Song”, because it was the only thing we felt we could come even relatively close to repeating more than once.

We were also playing out occasionally during this period, sometimes utilizing motives and ideas from these songs. We’ve never really done a song the same way twice, but often during this time, we figured out how to start off a song with a certain progression and then take the journey from there.
Usually this would lead us to very different places by the end of the songs.

I still remember the first show we tried, we actually played Track 5 (“The Song”) several times because so few people were there during the first performance that we felt we should play it again after people actually showed up.
I love Track 3 from this album as well, which we often referred to as the “Snow Ballad”. It’s a very sweet ballad with a slow pace. Something born in Neil’s attic on a snowy Sunday afternoon.

To download the album:
1 Go to the Tracks Listen :: Album page.
2 Scroll down past the player and you’ll see a link labelled “Download this Album”.
3 Simply click on this link and the album is yours, complete with the album artwork.

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 Your Island [4:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (41)

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Summer is here and we wanted to kick it off with some dub reggae.

Dub and reggae music has always been a strong influence on me personally. Most particularly it’s influenced my bass playing. I learned the importance of laying down a solid groove line from dub music. Additionally, when I produce I often work with a layered approach and like to use dub-style delays regularly.

Lyrically, Your Island focuses on the need to occasionally step back and take a look at your life to see if you are living in a way that satisfies you. To me, it’s an incredibly important thing to make sure I’m living my life in a way that both makes me happy and that I’m living in a way that helps the people around me. Thankfully, right now, I feel that my life fulfills these requirements and I hope to keep it that way.

I hope everyone enjoys this one as much as we enjoyed writing it.

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Explore the album, Space Explorer, for free this week.

Space Explorer was the album that Ryan, Jeremy and Neil put together right before I joined the project so I have very little to say as to the album’s creative process. However, I do remember the day Jeremy came to the session with the CDs to hand out to everyone. I was very new to the project and was still trying to figure out exactly how I fit in. I think I was bringing in a different instrument to try just about every week at the time.

During this period of time, every session was essentially a set of very, very long jams that would meander from one style of music to another. I know Neil’s mentioned that it wouldn’t be unheard of that they would jam constantly for 45 minutes or more at a time! Often the sessions were just explorations in sound. We were just coming up with some of the craziest sounds we could make with the instruments we had. Thankfully, we had quite a few neat toys to alter sound in a ton of strange and interesting ways. Most notable on this recording in particular was Ryan’s bass and the giant effects processor that he was using at the time to come up with different ways of altering bass guitar sounds. I really love a lot of the crazy slides he coaxes out his bass on this recording.

Fun times with exploration.
Check it out.

To download the album:
1 Go to the Space Explorer Listen :: Album page.
2 Scroll down past the player and you’ll see a link labelled “Download this Album”.
3 Simply click on this link and the album is yours, complete with the album artwork.

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 Heartbeat Baltimore [2:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (46)

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I’ve spent the majority of my adult life in the city of Baltimore and, although I have to admit that I didn’t like the town much when I first started hanging around it, I’ve grown to really appreciate the city and it’s culture. Of course, like any other city, it has it’s negative aspects. The city’s issues with crime and education are often central issues in media headlines.
However, Baltimore’s creative culture is unique and always interesting. Visual arts around the the city are often the focal point, with a lot of focus on things like found art and urban styles like graffiti. The city’s music is as diverse as it’s people, often with heavy influence from the city’s blue-collar culture and origin.
Heartbeat Baltimore is a song to sing the praises of the city’s creativity and hard work. Played in an aggressive and rhythmic in-your-face style, the song is meant to shout out to the city and point out the aspects of it that have led me to enjoy the time I’ve spent here.

Read the Lyrics

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This week’s free album download is Knick Knacks.
Knick-Knacks represents what the name implies. When we first started up chilljam.com, we weren’t quite sure what do to with the site. We had no real organized method for producing the songs and weren’t quite sure of how we wanted to organize the releases. However, shortly afterwards, we started working on thematic ideas for groups of songs. These organized releases eventually became themed albums such as In My Other Life… and The Daily Routine.
However, at the same time, we didn’t want to stress too much about producing such premeditated works so we produced a number of songs just for fun. These stray songs eventually worked together into the album, Knick-Knacks.
Although these works weren’t approached with quite as much forethought as the other themed albums we did around the same time, Knick-Knacks contains many of my favorite chilljam.com songs. The Photographer was the first song I remember singing along to one Beavis’ guitar lines and was the first song I remember purposefully concentrating on positive subject matter for a chilljam.com song. Corner was a fun little ditty I remember playing in my basement one day. And Drops was a fun, free song that Jeremy and I worked on at his house.

To download the album:
1 Go to the Knick-knacks Listen :: Album page.
2 Scroll down past the player and you’ll see a link labelled “Download this Album”.
3 Simply click on this link and the album is yours, complete with the album artwork.

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 The World [2:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (37)

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Here’s another creation from the wonderful lunch breaks with the Mac. I think Earth Day had some influence in this as the overall theme is what The World would sound like if it had it’s own sound. I used whatever the Mac could provide with the conga loops to the sitar and meshed it together with other sounds that mimic the earth.

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Here’s another free album download, Haywire Transmission.
Haywire Transmission is a collection of electronically written pieces that I was working on before I joined the chilljam.com project. After the dissolution of my previous band, Stars Burn Out, I needed to find a new creative outlet. I didn’t really know any other musicians that were available and accessible. So I picked up a copy of FL Studio and started playing around with writing music with my computer for the first time.
When I joined chilljam.com, I found ways of layering these song parts in a manner so that I could trigger them in our improvisational environment. Many of our earliest sessions involved quite a few of these songs, however, we were not regularly recording during that time so many of those original jams are lost to time.

To download the album:
1 Go to the Haywire Transmission Listen :: Album page.
2 Scroll down past the player and you’ll see a link labelled “Download this Album”.
3 Simply click on this link and the album is yours, complete with the album artwork.

(more…)

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Yes, I know the site was an utter disaster last week but it’s all fixed now.

There were things I didn’t like about the original background image for the redesigned site that have been bugging me since launch. On computers with high resolution settings, the original image came nowhere close to filling the entire screen and it just looked terrible when viewed on these machines. So last week, I put together a different background image but it ended up just looking like a mess. The image totally detracted from the main content, which is the whole point of this site so I decided to redo it again this week as well as fix some other issues that have been problematic.

In addition, I found a nice widget for handling Category and Tag surfing so that it’s a bit more fun to play with. You’ll find that in the right sidebar now on every page.

Please feel free to let us know your thoughts.

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 Let It Go [3:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (33)

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Let It Go is a late night experiment.
I was playing around with my acoustic and wondered what it’d be like to just let it go and not pay attention to rhythm or melody…or really anything at all. I just let my fingers move around as they felt like without any concern or thought of where they were going or what they were doing.
In the end, it sounded a bit tribal mixed with some flamenco feel stuff in there. Then I decided to just do the same thing with my voice. I just started singing and shouting stuff in my basement without studying the song or what was going on with it. To some extent, I was able to watch the sound waves of the guitar track on the screen as I recorded so I was able to have some idea of when the guitar would come in and out.

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In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be setting up links where you can now download our albums for free from the Listen :: Album pages, starting with our earliest material first.
So this week’s Free Album Download is “Emailed Music”.

The beats were first assembled by Warren Carroll out of Richmond, VA, and were then emailed to myself and Matthew Hundley from D.C. who layers the fine guitar work throughout the tracks.  All of the music was emailed  back and forth between the 3 of us over a 7 month time period until each song was full.  This was a lot of fun to do, and we’re currently  in the process of creating more emailed music. 

To download the album:
1 Go to the Emailed Music Listen :: Album page.
2 Scroll down past the player and you’ll see a link labelled “Download this Album”.
3 Simply click on this link and the album is yours, complete with the album artwork.

(more…)