Download the full album, S+G, from chilljam.com.
Our most recent release and the last of these archived album free downloads, S+G is the beginning of some work we were putting together for a film that Neil scripted. We began filming the work but ran into some technical issues that delayed our progress on it. However, we thought it was still worthwhile to release some of the music we’d put together for the soundtrack into this short EP.

To download the album:
1 Go to the S+G 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.

Thugs – Thugs was entirely written using FL Studio on my old dying IBM laptop. I remember actually putting the song together with my son. I’d put some sounds down and then ask him his thoughts and he’d give me additional ideas. It was a pretty fun task putting it together.
Street Corner – Street Corner, also written with FL Studio, was an attempt at putting together the most minimal song I could compose yet still feel like it was connected together. A very chill piece, it gives the feeling of walking through dark streets at night.
Cannibal – Cannibal is one of my favorite compositions we’ve worked on as chilljam. The song addresses the tremendous greed that led to the recent economic recession we’ve been experiencing over the last year or so. The basic drum line was created through FL Studio. Neil added some crazy saxophone work on top of it and then Jeremy layered everything together into the final product.
Reinvent Ourselves – This was a fun one to do. One day Beavis and I went over to Jeremy’s to jam on some stuff. Jeremy put together most of this track before our arrival so that we’d have something to work with. We took turns layering sounds on top of the work Jeremy did. Beavis put together the sweet guitar line here and then I combined two sets of lyrics I’d written to work as the vocal line for the song. Then after Beavis had to go, I sang another set of lyrics on top to chorus on top of my original vocals.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

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.

Download the full album, Static, from chilljam.com.
Static is the most recent full length release that we’ve compiled as chilljam. Primarily consisting of jammed out journeys in sound, Static is a great collection of some of our most consistent instrumental material to date. Most specifically, however, Static marks some of the last songs we were mixing down primarily with Audacity. Shortly after this, we started recording and mixing the majority of our songs on Apple Mac machines using Garageband. However, because of the difference in how the software works, there are different elements of control that each type of software concentrated on so this led to differing sounds in the end products.
Audacity, in the mixing process allows for a much more segmented mixing process, so that we were able to choose very small segments of individual instruments and tweak them. This led to some interesting sonic layers, which you can hear in a lot of the works here. Additionally, the reverbs and effects in Audacity have a much more analog feel to them, often sounding as if you’re listening to the songs off a cassette tape.

To download the album:
1 Go to the Static 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.

Echo Lake – A long jam that reminded me of a time when I visited Echo Lake in Frederick County, Maryland. I’m not quite sure why it reminded me of the visit; it was over 10 years ago. But for some reason, when we wrapped up the recording, that’s what came to mind. I think this may have been the last time that I heavily used my Parker P-38 guitar for any of our songs. Generally, we try to stay away from heavily electronic guitar driven songs, but there’s something really fun about taking these journeys on my P-38. I really love that guitar because it always feels a bit like I’m fighting with the guitar through the song. It’s always a bit of a struggle. I end up choking it, bending strings, bending the neck and all sorts of things with it. Playing the instrument is a very physical thing and it’s fun to do sometimes.

Ask Me Later – I love how Neil mixed this one together, especially right at the beginning, when it feels like all the instruments just flow in together. To tell you the truth, I barely remember actually playing this song, it didn’t really occur to me as a song of interest at the time when we played it. However, after Neil mixed it down and cleaned up the recording, I can hear the cool things Neil heard in the song.

Happy and Low – This was a fun little ditty to play. I hadn’t played chorded parts on my bass in quite awhile and wanted to play around with it that day. Jeremy’s keys on here are so sunny and happy and Neil’s drums have a nice bright feel to them. The song reminds me of a great sunny day.

Statistical Energy – A mystical song. Jeremy’s keys have a great mysterious feel and leads us all on a journey

Seahorse – This is an odd one. Right after listening to Jason Zeh’s album, Heraclitus, I wanted to try to put together a piece inspired by it. Seahorse is actually a segment of collected sounds from various recordings put together but utilizing alteration tools to play with the wave patterns. Various instruments played in reverse or with stretched out wave patterns.

Rising of the Sax – This was a jam we played with a saxophone player who came to play with us one night, who wishes to remain anonymous.

Lazy Sun Melts – A relaxing piece that reminds me of a soft, quiet sunset on a warm summer day. The guitar work on this song is strange, I was doing some odd string bends in conjunction with some delays.

Digital Camouflage – Digital Camouflage has that building epic feel that we often like to play with. It’s a driving song that charges forward. I love Neil’s drum work on this song, which pushes everything forward.

To the Water – The only song on the album that includes vocal work, To the Water is a tribal piece driven primarily by Neil’s raw drum. I love the storm sounds towards the end of the song as well. There’s a great atmosphere in this one.

Creepjacker – Named for Neil’s favorite item in a video game we play, Creepjacker is a creepy little number with some strange sounds from Jeremy’s keys. The portomento is crazy here and I love the drunken rhythm pushing the song along.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Static 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.

Download Cover Band from chilljam.com.
One day, while we were playing in Neil’s loft, I noticed some lyrics on the floor for The Grateful Dead’s Brokedown Palace. I guess someone was jamming on the song with Neil at some point. While Jeremy, Neil and Jim were jamming on something, I decided to pick up the lyrics and just sing along to what they were playing using the lyrics. It worked out well and spurred us into trying some songs by other artists. We didn’t try to play the original song in music, but often, I’d listen to what everyone was playing and just look up the lyrics for something I thought would work on my iPhone.

To download the album:
1 Go to the The Flame 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.

High Lonesome, by The Gaslight Anthem, is a personal favorite song of mine and it was really fun to play the song here along with Jim Stuby on banjo. It was the perfect song to have banjo on. Unfortunately, the vocals and the banjo were recorded to the same channel which made it tough for Jeremy to mix down in post production, but it still comes across pretty well.
Gun Street Girl, by Tom Waits, is an interesting one. Bob Peters jammed with us that evening on Banjo and Drums (he plays drums on this particular song). Neil is playing bass here. It was fun to do a different kind of spoken word take on this classic.
Red Rain, by Peter Gabriel, has always been one of my favorite songs. I would probably rank it somewhere in my list of top 5 best songs ever so it was exciting to get to try a different take on it. When reading through the lyrics, Red Rain is a pretty intense piece and it was interesting giving it a more aggressive feel in our version of it here.
Looks Like Rain, by The Grateful Dead was a fun song to do. Although our version of Brokedown Palace didn’t survive well in the recording, we did do several other Grateful Dead songs. Now, I have to admit that Looks Like Rain is not one of my favorite overall of their songs, but the lyrics sounded like they fit the feel that the guys were playing here.
Split Open and Melt, by Phish, has some really crazy effects on my voice. It was fun to play around with some effects again and do a song like this in a really strange surreal manner. It feels like the song is melting as your listening to it.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Cover Band by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 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.

Download the full album, The Flame, from chilljam.com.
Space Explorer might be my favorite “album”, but the title track from The Flame is my favorite single recording-even when I listen to it now I am surprised that it was entirely improvised (like just about everything we do-but this particular song really sounds pre-meditated).  At the time of recording this collection of songs Joe was playing bass most of the time, so there is less guitar, and the keyboards are really the focus.  Joe’s bass playing is solid, and really helps my drumming too.  This album is primarily instrumental, great music for headphones, since there is often a lot going on you won’t pick up otherwise. 

To download the album:
1 Go to the The Flame 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.

This may be the best mixed album we have, it was all recorded using a MOTU 1224 8-channel interface and Audacity software. I had this system for a while, but I think on these recordings I had really figured out how to use it well. Unfortunately when my PC crashed and I switched to a laptop I had to start using a different system (current Alesis 16 track firewire system). Joe did most of the mixing for this album, and added some fun post- effects to the drums. The last recording, Slow Like Fish, features Jim Stuby, playing banjo.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

The Flame 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.

Download the album, In My Other Life, this week on chilljam.com.
In My Other Life sprung from a set of song ideas that spoke from the point of view of particular people who have lived in history. Although there are only 3 songs in this release, each stands as some of our most unique works and marks a transition for me into starting to use pre-written lyrical ideas and concepts. However, with these songs, I had yet to actually bring the lyrics with me to sessions to work with. Often, I would write some ideas for possible use as lyrics on my computer at home or work and would read them before heading off to meet up with with the guys. Then when we’d play, I’d try to work off of what I remembered in my head.

To download the album:
1 Go to the In My Other Life… 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.

Siddhartha retells the life of Siddhartha Gautama, or often better known as “Buddha”, as seen through Hermann Hesse’s book, Siddhartha. Although, I’m not sure I consider myself to be an official “buddhist”, the concepts of the religion interest me greatly and I’ve spent a great deal of time reading literature discussing the religion. The lyrics from this particular piece are from the point of view of Siddhartha, the Boatman. At the end of the novel, Siddhartha Gautama becomes a simple boatman, carrying passengers across a river. He expresses the uncontrollable aspect of water, how it flows in the direction it chooses and it has very little to do with human action. He simply accepts the river and works with it as it allows to work as the boatman. The final lyrics of the song are “Breathe in, Breathe Out, and Keep on Moving”, which distill down what I personally believe is the core of the philosophy.

Turner is an interesting subject matter. I watched a video on YouTube concerning the confessions of Jon Michael Turner’s actions in the Iraqi conflict. The video details, in his own words, a vivid description of his kills during combat and how he felt about them. He seemed a tortured man to me. Later that week, when we played, I had no intention of bringing this story to mind, but somehow this came to mind when Neil and Jeremy played the music here. Nothing in this song was pre-written, I just imagined myself as a young man who went to war and perhaps found something in war that he didn’t expect to encounter in himself.

I love Neil’s crazy drums in James Dean. He just goes off in a chaotic drum-n-bass feel here and Jeremy does a fantastic job dressing the scene in dripping tones. From my perspective, I tried to describe what I thought Dean might have felt in that final car crash that ended his life. He appeared to live the life of someone constantly in the fast lane and died in a blaze of glory, similar to how he seemed to live his life. There are some crazy effects in this one, mostly added in post-production. I had a lot of fun mixing this one down and purposefully going overboard with adding as many crazy sounds as I could. Perhaps it’s a bit overindulgent but that seemed appropriate for a song about James Dean.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

In My Other Life… 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.

Download the album, The Daily Routine, this week on chilljam.com.
The lyrical ideas for The Daily Routine came about during a period in which I was working directly for a government contractor in Washington, D.C. The album describes aspects of my daily commute into D.C. on the MARC train and Metro, my day-to-day work, and then the ride home during the evenings. As one can probably tell in the lyrics, I never really felt like I was the right fit for the job and culture of the position I was in. I felt no problems handling my responsibilities. But, as a web developer working for the government, I was really looking forward to developing something that I felt would be publicly beneficial. I ended up finding out the much of the work involved the politics of apathy. Most people I worked with simply didn’t care and were just there for the paycheck. Lyrically, this album describes my observations and thoughts during this time.

To download the album:
1 Go to the The Daily Routine 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!

The Daily Routine 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.

This week we’re releasing my favorite of the chilljam albums recorded to date. Lonely Microphone Recordings were recorded during a period of transition for the project. The PC that we were using for most of our recordings to this point died on us, disabling our ability to record multitrack recordings for mix down in post production. However, we wanted to continue to capture what was going on so Jeremy brought up a recording device and we attached a single room microphone to it to basically capture all of the sound in the room as it happened. So effectively we had no way of mixing any of the instrument levels. This is basically a series of live recordings.
Despite this raw method of recording, I really loved the massive sound this album has, along with some epic songs and flowing structures.
Hunt 17 tells the story of predator and prey and how their roles can be reversed given particular circumstances. The story begins with one character hunting another deep in the jungle. However, after the hunter fails to kill the prey despite leaving him/her as dead, the prey turns around and comes back after the original hunter leading to an eventual confrontation between the two.
See What’s Inside, Open Gate and Locked Door were all recorded with Beavis the following weekend. These 3 songs are some of the best jam sets that I think we’ve ever done and each song flows easily into the next with some great peaks and valleys.

To download the album:
1 Go to the Lonely Microphone Recordings 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!

Lonely Microphone Recordings 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.

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.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Tracks 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.

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.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Space Explorer 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.

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.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Knick Knacks 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.