37 Solo Albums and counting .... talking abt my musik thru then now and later

[tristan_geoff]

as some of y'all may know, I have an extremely dense and comprehensive discography of solo albums that I've been making since slightly before I showed up on Music Banter, though my real start to gaining confidence and context to my expressional outputs was after I had joined and thru interacting with the Forum Member Showcase.

You might remember these early recordings under the names MC Trustan, and especially SNZZZOV*EN, who I adopted as a pen name after making this thing I saw as a silly little noise release.  SNZZZOV*EN being a combination of a Snoop Dogg meme my ex showed me backinthadayyy and local-ish sludge metal group Buzz Ov-en.  MC Trustan was a rap MC name given to me by a childhood friend.

I have certain impressions I get from listening thru my discography so often, which helps me to both understand myself, my artistic evolution, and the situations and environments that inspired the songs to be made.  I also have interpretations of my art, picking apart the music by genre, by time period, seeing deeper meanings and inferring about different motifs and themes that my subconscious has been feeding into my art.

The question came up recently to me that I want to begin to interpret what major themes exist throughout my work?  I've come to a few realizations, that it's about understanding regret, that it's about relaying my emotions.

Lately, I think I've realized that the major overall theme in my music is decay through artificially designed institutions.  This is things like, the internet making it harder to communicate to your neighbors while seemingly making it easier.  A deeper understanding is what many people lack in this modern era.  Further, I think a lot of it is also based in the fact that technology, and our world at large, was not designed with permanence or sustainability in conscious mind.  Rather, things are often designed to break in this society, so that further products can be bought and sold.

The way I relate this theme in my work is through glitchy textures, through noise that brings to mind brain fog, and overstimulation, to name a few techniques I have used.  It represents a lot of things like decay of myself, of my friendships, of the world around me, and helps me better relate to how I can consciously change myself and become a better friend to others.

I also approach these things often with nuance as to using particular dynamics, timbres, and abundance or lack of extended techniques over more classical structures, so that I can effectively describe certain things subconsciously.

I have a few works I would describe as my absolute best, and among them I want to talk about a specific 3.

The first is,



No Curfew Kids - The Night Rider 11/20/2021

Genre: Deconstructed Club/MIDI Music

Trigger Warning: suicidality

I wrote this with the full intention of it being the last thing I ever released.  I was in a dark time in my life, and the significance of the venue I played this at was not lost on me.  Even though when booking it it was more a matter of playing a popular spot with some friends, what I realize now is that I wanted to end noting the place where I started to feel I was making it musically.  I was playing with my college band here up until leaving in 2020 at the start of the pandemic.  What was supposed to be my final gig with them was cancelled because lockdown started.

Since then, I've learned that the band life was not for me.  It's just counter-intuitive to the way I need to make art.  Collaborations are awesome and fun, but I need to be able to make them at my own pace.  But on this release, it is clear that I am trying with my might to prove myself.  To show there is something to prove.  I made this for all the people that truly either didn't get my music, didn't want to, or otherwise were dismissive of my output.  Since then, I've realized more that I've always wanted to make music for myself, and then share my output online so the option to listen to it is there.  But then, I was deeply confused and hurt.  Instead of healing, I leaned onto these entitled emotions.

Musically,
This release was influenced by artists like De Schuurman, David Wise (as in the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack artist), music of friends like Burial Sounds or even fellow performers at the gig (UniKilo, Yellaflexus, and GreesyGeazer), Masakatsu Takagi, Popul Vuh, Ophidian, and others I could go on but lol.

The first track is like, very Bubbling influenced but it goes thru layers of harsh noise, industrial hardcore influenced downbeats, and new age inspired pianos, progressing into an even noisier more ominous section.  Then into a part that was very much influenced by the first release by The Prodigy under the filter of Warioland 4 samples.  The final section decays into a glitched sunset.

I can speak more on this release later, but for now I'd like to go in to the other 2 I mentioned.

[tristan_geoff]

No Curfew Kids - Territory (Next Years Snow 2023)

Genre: Deconstructed Club/Art Pop/EBM/Glitch/Ambient/Experimental

My two releases from this era were both released thru Octa Mobius Sheffner affiliated bandcamp labels.  They both occupied a really odd place in my music, as far as that they were released with more nuance than ever to creative decisions and rewriting certain elements that I saw as improving the flows of the songs.  I paid more careful attention to this and Text.Bed than I have with some other recordings.

The place was weird, not due to the fact that I was branching out of my comfort zone, but because during the rollout, recording, and release of Text.Bed, which I saw and continue to see as an artistic high, though the last of that particular train of thought that persisted thru the year of recordings, was released thru a bandcamp netlabel.

I love the people involved, do not be mistaken.  My close friend Valyri is partnered with Octa, and both of their music and by extension the people involved with the label are some of the most forward thinking musicians of the current era.  I am still honored to be in contact with these individuals, they continuously inspire and motivate me, which is partially why these two albums are so important in context for the album I released earlier this month.

Bandcamp was seeing uncertainty as a platform at the time, because of it's acquirement by licensing company, SongTradr, who was treated with the benefit of the doubt at first, and then fired the recently formed Bandcamp Union, or at least a majority of these members of the Bandcamp staff.

After this happened, I took all my stuff off bandcamp only leaving two releases that are available only as free download with no option to purchase thru the site.  I eventually moved the bulk of the material I made there, and continue to upload the many many releases I've made since 2013 to several different sites.

By saying this, I am relaying that this was actually very helpful for my artistic development.  In ways I didn't see then, but began to later on.

This being the second to last big bandcamp release I put out, I had learned a lot of lessons since the beginnings of me posting to the site.  The album Territory is full of references to past material, though they are not immediately obvious and manifest mostly in some motifs that I consciously revisit in my work as a whole.  This release shows that, yeah, a lot of people may see my albums as confusing in terms to flow and disjointed feeling.  Honey, this is a feature not a bug.  That is literally how my brain operates daily in music form.  This album is similar in that it tackles many different sounds and ideas though within the confines of a greater concept as far as genre and theme.  The first track is an ambient pop kinda song that features something I often do.  Experiment with things that are outside of my comfort zone.  I find with my music I am often trying not to replicate things I have done in the past, at least by way of approaching the creation flow differently each time.  I will present and be forced to utilize limitations, I will use instruments I rarely use and play them in unexpected ways.  Often, I keep the very first take and that is the one you hear.  I feel like to use second third fourth etc. takes is often overthinking both the process and your own intuition which u must trust.  I leave mistakes in my music deliberately a lot of the time, as it relays specific ideas about what I was doing to make the song, and has in the future after release have come to understand a lot of these subconscious themes of my music through what seems to be a mistake at first.

There's like really club leaning tracks that go in unexpected ambient and hellscape territory, as well as full fledged glitchy and repetitive hellscapes.  I also put a few pop songs on this album, which is further challenging my comfort in creation.

This is among my best work, and I revisit it often.  Friends tell me it is one of their favorites too.  The track "Do Not Stand There" is possibly one of the best I've created.

[Lexi Darling]

@tristan_geoff Listening to the first album now. You had me at David Wise and Popol Vuh. I can definitely hear the former in some of the percussion elements. I was unfamiliar with the idea of deconstructed club before now, quite interesting stuff. I dig how fractured it sounds while still being intricate and clearly purposeful musically. I really like the chiptuney bubbles and Atari noises at the beginning of track 3.

[grindy]

@tristan_geoff Listening to the first album now. You had me at David Wise and Popol Vuh. I can definitely hear the former in some of the percussion elements. I was unfamiliar with the idea of deconstructed club before now, quite interesting stuff. I dig how fractured it sounds while still being intricate and clearly purposeful musically. I really like the chiptuney bubbles and Atari noises at the beginning of track 3.

You've never heard any Deconstructed Club before? There is so much cool stuff there! Definitely a genre to explore.

[Lexi Darling]

You've never heard any Deconstructed Club before? There is so much cool stuff there! Definitely a genre to explore.

From what I can see I do know some of it, I didn't know it by name but apparently people call Sophie and Arca that and I know and like both of them. From what I understand there is a lot of overlap between it and hyperpop and I am a big fan of some of that.

[grindy]

From what I can see I do know some of it, I didn't know it by name but apparently people call Sophie and Arca that and I know and like both of them. From what I understand there is a lot of overlap between it and hyperpop and I am a big fan of some of that.

Ah, okay. Makes sense then. IMO anyone interested in electronic music is bound to have come across it in the last years. I personally love the sound design, especially of the "cleaner" sounding artists, e.g. Sophie, Arca, Patricia Taxxon, Kai Whiston... There is something about this whole "crispiness" that's very attractive to my ears.

[tristan_geoff]

Did not have enough energy that night to do the 3rd album I mentioned, here goes.

SNZZZOV*EN - SNZZZFEST (2016)

Genre: Noise/Musique Concrete/Industrial

This release was the first solo thing I put online on Bandcamp.  It's concept and execution was birthed from the Music Banter Forum Member Showcase.  I was really involved in listening to music made by fellow forum members, and the music they made influenced this release in a few different ways that I will point out.  I was also influenced by other music I was then discovering, as well as more abstract ideas.

The record was created majorly by layering effects onto sounds I made with my voice in Audacity.  This included beatboxing, paulstretched and/or distorted droning textures, and occasional samples.  The two samples I immediately remember are a sample of Donkey Kong Country's Fear Factory played in reverse and muffled (probably by resampling?) and another song ending with the tv show that was on in the background, a clip from an episode of Clarence.

The resulting album is a harsh disorienting listen, one with odd turns and unexpected sound designs that might even generate fear responses.  The CRAZIEST thing about this record/EP is that I recorded it before I had heard really any genuine Industrial music?  Though it very much does sound like that genre.

The track HN/SN/SN is actually an abbreviation for Discharge's song Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, and the song itself is an interpretive cover, you can hear it in the initial noise and the notes I am making vocally.

The infamous Track 4 is a collage of several different recordings of my high school group, Into the Nothing, edited to be exponentially faster and then layered on top of each other, accompanied by my screams.

The final track was the first recorded, and it got a good enough response after posting it on Music Banter that I made the rest of the record.

[tristan_geoff]

^ shoutout Frownland.  Wolves in Sheepskin was probably the biggest reference I used on this record.

[tristan_geoff]

No Curfew Kids/Beli Yo'il - A Canary in the Dreamfield (2020)

Genre: Industrial/Post-Industrial

This record started in 2018, I had signed Beli Yo'il's previous album as one of the first cassettes on my label.  Our mutual respect and interest in each other's music, my newest release at the time being the first No Curfew Kids album, led to us deciding on a concept for a collab record.  The cover art came first or early in process, and the first track I recorded was the first one, Inertia.  This track was done using a recently obtained contact mic, using it on my mandolin, and a cable I finally got for my interface, allowing the drum machine direct input into my audio interface.  I started with the bass riff, recorded drum machine and then takes of the bass riff, added samples (one I remember being in here is from the Yeule track "Pocky Boy" that's edited into an ethereal vocal drone), added acoustic guitar mandolin...  It was also one of maybe a handful of tracks I produced using GarageBand between my venturing from Audacity and my as of yet acquirement of Studio One, which is the DAW I've used since late 2018.  The track is a buildup, ending in a primal contemplative crescendo and ceasing of a drum machine track.  It's among many favorites of my discography to me, and the significance of this track is not lost in that it was recorded during a week long party my brother threw at my parent's place the first week of my last semester of college.  I was in a very difficult headspace and was drunk during the recording of at least the guitar.

Hare Trail, track two, was one of the first tracks I really leaned into electronic production with.  It's a mix of drones, acoustic instruments, electronic drums, interpolation, edited samples, and a similar crescendo and buildup.  It's pretty kewl I think.  There's even a sequel track I made a few years later.

The standout of the record by far is our collaboration track (the album features 2 solo tracks from each of us and this collab track in the middle of the two section) which leaned heavily into creating an uncompromising atmosphere.  The song began as a few simple percussive stem that rises in intensity, and was compared by Beli to a Swans track.  Dark and contemplative keyboards accompany this loop later on, adding on as it goes.  The end of the track is a mini remix of some of the stems.  It's pretty kewl I think.

I don't feel at liberty to talk on the creation or meaning of Beli's tracks, though they are very good as well.

https://mirlo.space/nocurfew/release/a-canary-in-the-dreamfield-(with-beli-yo'il)

[tristan_geoff]

and now for something I haven't done in this thread yet: the most recent album

No Curfew Kids - Cool Font Tour


Genre: Noise Rock/Industrial/Free Improvisation

For months, I have been planning a tour around playing in Boone, NC on April 5th 2024.  Now, it has been 3 days since me, Valyri Sheffner Harris, and my friend debuting as Amateur Surgeon went west thru North Carolina to play 3 nights on tour.  The emotions within were multi-faceted, and while I cannot speak for what they experienced, I certainly learned a lot about myself, my friends, and my art this week.  The sets I did were the first in which I played electric guitar live, no longer limited to playing drums or even other electronic instruments I normally would have used, this time leading a band each night whose cast depended on the location.  Thru these performances I wanted to answer the question of, "can people engage in live music in a similar way as before the advent of it's recording?".  Each night was very different in terms of what I played and how close I could get to absorbing myself into the audience's emotions and that influencing the improvised music.  But overall, I very much think that the question was answered with a No.  At least in today's progressive attention loss, it was extremely hard to even get the audience's attention the third night, and I hope you will read this to see why.

4/3 ; Duke Coffeehouse in Durham

Playing here was surreal, I found out about the venue way back in high school as a Jeff Rosenstock tour stop, and 3 days after I performed here Portrayal of Guilt did as well.  This was the most heartwarming night of tour audience wise, as it was full of friends, and started us out with a hopeful journey.  My friend David joined me playing acoustic guitar, with Valyri on autoharp and electronics, and we played a set that weaved in and out of somberness, heaviness, and uncertainty.  The audience seemed to dig it, and from their immediate reactions seemed relatively interested in what we were playing.  On the album, this track I added a sample of Valyri's neighbor messing with yard shit going in to a section of Laura Jane Grace and Genesis P-Orridge on a podcast I had heard years prior.  I think that fits well as they are discussing touring and it's effects on the mind, it then fades into the first track.  It's also fitting as, at the end of the improv I went into a cover of Those Anarcho Punks are Mysterious by Against Me!  This cover was nothing like I had practiced for, but the show had to go on and it did.  That first night I broke 2 guitar strings, and by the 2nd night decided that I was not going to buy more for the tour.  The process of decay on my guitar I figured was symbolic, and this played into how the other sets went.

4/4 ; The Dungeon in Burlington

This show we played with a few different grindcore and noise acts, and was this house's first show.  I planned to play an anti-metalhead set, trying to make it as fun and "annoying" as possible as a sort of mini-protest on my view that most metalheads have this like, counterintuitive thought process that u should not take ur music seriously but also lack fun.  So me and Valyri played musical autism for our 20 minute set here, incorporating spur of the moment silliness, such as me shouting "the lucky charms mascot killed 500 men" and Valyri playing video game music, along with some guitar drones with a bow I brought (which deteriorated over tour to the point that on the 3rd night I was slapping the back of the bow against the guitar to make noise) and other stuff.  This night was one of my favorites as far as, it had the biggest audience and maybe microdosing magic things helped lol.  Anyways,

4/5 ; Lily's Snack Bar in Boone

This night was cathartic.  I want to keep this way shorter than the track itself, which ended up being a 3 person live collab between me, Valyri, and Hadith of Black Flags (a Boone local playing her first show ever) for nearly an hour and a half.  It started with harsh noise, went into dark ambient territories, and for a large part of the time I was switching between playing guitar darkly also ethereally and shouting just WAILING about different social failures in our current world.

This set was themed by the audience's relative apathy.  We came to this show specifically excited for the huge audiences this bar normally gets, but for some reason or another there were few there and few paying attention at all.  This turned into me screaming directly referencing the audience, and you can hear how anguished I became during this performance in the recording.  It made for some intense stuff, at one point I was looking someone directly in my eyes and talking about how I have been trying to get a CPAP machine for 5 months, screaming over and over that the medical industry exists to kill us and profit from it.

If anyone walked away from that show thinking, maybe I should care more about my neighbors, I did my job.  Easily the highlight of the album despite it's length.

The final track is an interview I did a few weeks back, having written the questions for Valyri to ask me.  For how utterly stupid the questions were, we ended up discussing some pretty deep topics.

https://www.soundclick.com/nocurfewkids/?albumID=38149&content=albumInfo

[Saulaac]

I listened to a few of the tracks on your soundclick, Tristan, and they were great! The last one sounds like you are doing the interview in a car. It's all very spontaneous with a lot of funny moments.
As a bottom feeder bassist who is currently exploring the lower register, I need high screaming voices/ wailing saxes to put my lower notes in perspective so your post was very timely.
Keep on touring!