A lonely, isolated closet.  Cables and wires.  The pulse of a drum machine.  “I’ve wanted to make heavy, loud music for a long time…” says John King.  The artist, like many artists, adapting to a new way of doing things; forced by the shutdown to improvise alone.  His frame hung over an electric guitar, his long hair casting shadows on the strings.  DIIV on one shoulder.  Chastity on the other.  Kurt Vile is in there somewhere as well.  “I didn’t have a concept…” he continues.  “…just sort of a gut feeling”.  It’s been a long, strange musical journey for King, taking him from Canton, Ohio to Mexico to the backwater town of Killbuck to a solitary bedroom closet where his newest project was born.  “I just murmured weird sounds into the microphone for hours on loop”.  He made an EP of music, one layer at a time, rocking out against the impeding chaos of a pandemic.  “Dealing with the brink of desperation,” is how King puts it.  The murmurs, the improvisation, the songs slowly took shape, while never sacrificing their looseness.  They move about, like sounds bottled in a lava lamp, fluid, wild and beautiful, straight from the bedroom closet.  His own private Shame Chamber.     

You can stream and purchase the EP here.

Hello dear readers. I’m taking a few short paragraphs out of my regularly scheduled music reviews and write-ups to point you toward a few of my own music projects. I recently released two very different albums that you can listen to or purchase at the links below.

The first is a 70s-style rock and roll project we call “Killbuck”. The album was mostly recorded live onto a Goodwill-purchased tape recorder, at the end of a gravel back road, in a cabin in Killbuck, Ohio.   Matt Kurtz, John Finley, John King, Joe Farr and I collaborated over a love of dark sunglasses, Tom Petty and 3-chord rock songs. The result is our self-titled debut: 11 “heartland-soaked tunes full of Americana angst and Rust Belt blues”.

The second project is a new volume of hymns my friends and I recorded over the past year. Each of us took a different hymn to reinterpret and explore through our individual styles. All profits from the Harp Family Hymnbook: Vol. II will go to Mennonite Central Committee.

You can find Killbuck here , and the Harp Family Hymnbook Vol. II here.