As you might have already noticed, chilljam just got a bit of a restyle. I apologize for the long wait. After the site problems we experienced several months ago, which led to the destruction of chilljam’s last theme, I hadn’t had much of a chance to get to styling the new site properly…until today! Please let us know what you think of the new style. We’re trying to keep things relatively simple but add in some of the elements that helped define the site in the past.

Also, I wanted to bring up that the site just passed a major milestone with 20,000 downloads this week! It’s pretty amazing to think of how far we’ve come over the years and it’s great to know that there are so many others out there that are into listening to our work.

Thanks to everyone who’s been hanging out with us and checking out our material.

Hello everyone,
Yeah, I know it’s been awhile since you’ve seen any new material on here. Chilljam.com was on a roll for a little over two years straight with releasing new content every single week without fail. However, suddenly, we’ve disappeared for a month…
What happened?
Well, as with anything in life, we’re going through a bit of a transition period. Recently, Tony Biedenkapp has been playing with us much more regularly and we’re working on transitioning his sounds into the sound in a much more effective way. In addition, we’ve been recording some videos but have been having trouble with our audio recording equipment. Hopefully, we’ll resolve these problems as soon as we can, however, you’ll be able to check out some of the videos starting with tomorrow’s post. We apologize for the interruption in content but it’s been good having a bit of a break to refresh and rethink our approach. You’ll be seeing us get back on track with regular weekly posts again soon enough.
Thanks to everyone who’s been hanging out with us and checking out our material.

Check out the article about chilljam.com in this month’s Heed Magazine
A huge thanks to Amber Scott for putting the article together and Tracey Osborne for taking the photographs. It’s a great read and really gets into what we’re about here at chilljam.com.

Check out Tourist Zero’s take on The Lost Cymbal.
Our friends from Tourist Zero layered some great vocals on top of the chilljam.com version of The Lost Cymbal. Check it out here.

Check out Tourist Zero’s take on Opium Spice.
Our friends from Tourist Zero layered some great vocals on top of the chilljam.com version of Opium Spice. Check it out here.

One of the reasons I was originally interested in putting together the Chilljam.com site was that I wanted to focus on gathering together all of our material into one place. I thought it would be great to put it all together in a nice presentation so that others can access the work and enjoy it however they want. However, I also wanted to gather together the work that I’ve done with other projects in the past and present them in a way that is both accessible and enjoyable.
So today, we’ve got a new section on the right-hand column called “Links” in which we can link to sites with these works.
The first site we’ve got under this category is the Stars Burn Out Music Archive, which includes all of the recordings I have from one of the projects I previously worked with, Stars Burn Out.

Stars Burn Out Members
Chris Dickey
Nick Kelly
Tim Smith
Joe Osborne

Stars Burn Out, to me, revolved primarily around the friendships I have with each of the participating members of the band. The members of the band have been some of my best friends throughout my life and have helped me and participated in experiences stretching back through some of the earliest days of my adult life. Formed from previous bands of our youth such as AGMD and Sometimes Us, Stars Burn Out came together shortly after I’d finished my time spent playing in Tragic Drive.
For me, I was looking for Stars Burn Out to boil down the essentials of writing music. I was looking for a return to a more raw, straight-ahead approach after spending years playing and writing complicated choreographed sequences in Tragic Drive. I basically wanted to return to punk rock and just to have fun with playing again. It was a lot of fun playing with these guys again and I had a great time just getting together in my parent’s basement each week (thanks Mom and Dad for letting us play there, even when I didn’t live there anymore).
Start Transmission was the last set of recordings that I’ve done in a formal recording studio environment. I’m happy to say that there were some great memories laying down those tracks. Drew Mazurek did a fantastic job bringing together our sound. I really love this disk. The vigor and phrasing on this disc is unparalleled with any other work I’ve participated on. Although there were signs that we were each starting to head our own ways during this recording, I have always treasured the times we spent recording Start Transmission.
After Start Transmission, there was a hiatus period in which we did not play. Each of us was starting to find ourselves and who we were as adults. Our interests, both musical and personal, were starting to drift apart and we all went on to explore them individually. I believe during this period, I’d gone on to play in The Stray.
After some time, however, Nick, Chris and I regrouped to have some fun playing the old songs again. We also started to experiment with sound with extended jam sessions in which we’d explore playing without structure entirely. A large portion of these recordings were simply noise. However, some of these jams were fruitful and I was able to capture some of them on a little digital recording device that I’d set up for each session. These sessions led to 1-2-2006, 1-6-2006, 1-13-2006, and 2-25-2006 which are all represented here on the Stars Burn Out Music Archive. Some of these recordings are just noise, some are interesting, some are just plain goofy. But all in all, I really felt like they represented the final days of the band well. I learned a lot about how to work within these loose musical structures and a lot of these experiments likely led to some of my contributions in projects I’ve done since Stars Burn Out, including the stuff here on Chilljam.com.
In any case, I hope the material here represents Stars Burn Out respectfully in the eyes and ears of the other members of the band and I hope they can enjoy these works as much as I have over the years.

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.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Haywire Transmission by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

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.

Is there anything that you would like to see on chilljam.com?
Is there anything we can add that would make your experience here more interesting and fun?
Is there anything that annoys you about the site that you’d like changed?

If the answer to any of the above questions is “yes”, please feel free to post a comment to this entry and let us know.

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.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Emailed Music by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

Listen to the new album, S+G
During the last couple of months, our music has focused in two distinctly different directions.
Some of it has been very positive with bright tones and content focused on joy and contentment.
However, other aspects were focusing on very dark subjects, some of which I’d consider to be the darkest works we’ve done to date. These songs have been focused towards specific concepts which we’re hoping to release additional material for in the future but we wanted to go ahead and compile the material together into an album for you to listen to now.

Immerse yourself in a dark alley and check out the new album, S+G.

Keep an eye out in the next couple of weeks for more!

S+G by chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.