Mystic Daddy:

 

"My world as a musician really opened up with a class I took in Ableton Live and Propellerhead Reason in 2011. Suddenly I had all the tools I needed to program my own dance tracks. The MIDI geek was awakened! MIDI rules!

 

Up until that time, I had been creating sample based music, first in Pro Tools and later in Garageband, but always found samples too limiting for me. Now I could create anything! From scratch! Sooooo liberating and exciting!

 

I totally fell down the 'rabbit hole' in 2012, spending every spare moment writing, recording, programming and producing the twenty seven tracks that would become 'UnLeashed'. It was the most ecstatic and joyous experience of my life. Delicious multidimensional creative flow... yum!

 

'UnLeashed' is an appropriate name on so many levels, but foremost because it encompasses and expresses an internal/emotional/spiritual reality I've never shared with the world before. Built up over my lifetime so far, kind of a psychic atomic bomb I'm detonating and unleashing.

 

I call Album One - 'Time To Process'. It's a tough love processing of human, cultural, and global dysfunction, couched in fourteen tracks with a slightly harder edge. Time to bust your Self out of the crumbling, linear hierarchical fear based paradigm.

 

1. Fly Away

2. Magic Man

3. The Earth Is Alive

4. The Man

5. Dormez-Vous?

6. That Boy That Girl

7. Rebirth

8. Real World Hustler

9. Love Song ( To A Reptile )

10. Stepping Outside of Time

11. Surface Dwellers

12. Paralyzed

13. Dead Weight

14. Doubt

 

I call Album Two - 'Time To Emerge'. The old linear paradigm based limitations and belief systems have been shattered, and it's time to re-emerge in the new 5th dimensional energy. Rebirth into the new love based paradigm, celebrating and empowering Self, Spirit, and the Magic of all Life. Honoring and re-connecting with the Earth as our Home and Physical Source.

 

15. The World Is My Garden

16. I'm So High

17. Freaky ( As I Want 2 B )

18. Beat of Life

19. Time For A Revolution

20. Unleash The Power

21. Disco Song

22. Neptune in Pisces

23. R-S-D

24. Human

25. Dropping Out

26. Rhapsody of Being

27. Veil

Mystic Daddy:

 

" ...I've always loved music, both playing and listening to it. I've played piano/keyboard since I was pretty young. Took lessons in Classical Piano for years. My Mom was an amazing pianist. Perfect pitch, could improvise and play any song for you in any key, a great baritone voice. I always told her she missed her calling as a lounge singer and performer. I've sang with a few choirs throughout my life... as a baritone when I was younger, and as a bass more recently with the Albuquerque Queer chorus. I definitely enjoy choral work, the blending of multiple voices, but the singularity and magic of solo expression, for me, is unparalleled.

 

...Seems like I've been listening to music for as long as I can remember. I've always had some kind of soundtrack playing throughout my life. Music really feeds my soul. It's always been healing for me to just chill and get taken somewhere through a good song. I remember a few albums I had as a kid ... I loved Heart and really dug 'Barracuda' and 'Magic Man' especially, Elton John, ELO, The Beatles, David Bowie, The Pretenders, Styx, Pat Benatar ... nothing too exotic. I was in 7th or 8th grade when MTV started. It was a whole different world back then video-wise, but it was such a cool new visual medium. I was hooked. I got turned on to a bunch of new music in junior high when my brother came home from college for the first time. The Cure, English Beat, can't remember what else. But it was the start of my alternative music path.

 

...Gradually fell in with the other mutants in my high school and was exposed to lots of new music - Bauhaus (and all the subgroups - Love and Rockets, Tones on Tail, Peter Murphy (yum)), Siouxsie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance and everything else on 4AD, Depeche Mode, New Order and Joy Division, The Fall, The Sex Pistols, Shriekback, Gene Loves Jezebel, the Fall, Einstürzende Neubauten... oh the dark punk goth new wave list just goes on and on. You gotta remember this was the early 80's, before there was 'alternative' music, and you had to rely on college radio stations to play anything off the beaten path. There was only a hand full of us in my high school that listened to this kind of stuff and we were the freaks with spiked hair and dark clothes. I'd have to say being a teenager in the eighties kind of sucked. Pretty much. Yeah. Picture Dorrit from 'Carrie Diaries' as an even gloomier, sexually confused teenage boy from the Jersey suburbs and you've got the picture... ha ha!

 

...During my two years at Northwestern, I worked & DJ'd at the college radio station, WNUR, which broadcast into Chicago and the 'burbs and the surrounding area. There I was exposed to whole new worlds of music. Still a bit of an angry, depressed, punk rock boy I gravitated towards bands like Swans, Foetus, Laibach, Attrition, The Mekons, Diamanda Galas, Sonic Youth, Coil, Psychic TV and some of the experimental industrial bands like Nurse with Wound and Death in June, The Legendary Pink Dots and Edward Ka-Spel. The flip side of my taste for intense was a love of 'kitsch' like The Carpenters, Captain and Tenille, ABBA, and Dolly Parton (queer? me?). Also had a love of dance grooves which fully blossomed once my taste for boys made itself fully apparent and I became a true dancing 'queen'.

 

...After I transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for my final two years of school and was living in Chicago full-time, I got more and more into going out and dancing ... at the gay bars and nightclubs, at house and warehouse parties, at raves and outlaw parties. I was kind of an artist/club kid/raver hybrid. There was such a rich music culture in Chicago in the late 80's/early nineties. Lots of great DJ's like Derrick Carter, Miles Maeda, Mark Farina, Tom Pazen, and Josh Werner playing at a local bar. Lots of independent weekly nights at various venues. During this 'clubby' time I had worked at Wax Trax, the 'industrial dance' label, for a couple years and then was head buyer at Wax Trax, the store, for a couple years as well. I worked at the label when they started heading more towards electronica and dance - releasing the fabulous Warp label catalogue here in the states. Awesome bands like B12, Autechre, and Polygon Window. But I loved other Wax Trax bands like My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult (big 'ol crush on lead singer Frankie. Yum). During this time I was into bands like - The Orb, Orbital, Aphex Twin, Primal Scream, Ultramarine, Sun Electric, Future Sound of London, Bomb the Bass, Irresistible Force (and everything on Mixmaster Morris' label), William Orbit's Guerrilla Records, The Shamen, Electribe 101, Seefeel and on and on... I accumulated many mix tapes through these years from DJ friends... ambient, house, breakbeat, techno, dub, ... which I still listen to and enjoy.

 

...Since I've 'dropped out' and gone rural, I have definitely fallen out of the loop a bit. Thank god for digital music and the internet! I've managed to keep collecting dance tracks over the years from downloads and music blogs. Though I've listened almost exclusively to my own music for the past year and a half, I truly do love all kinds of music. I appreciate the creation and artistry behind it no matter what it is. Whether or not I also connect to it on deeper levels and it moves me is something else entirely. These days I can be all over the place... from Persian music to downtempo electronica. That said, I still prefer Indie and Alternative Dance most of the time... you can take the gay boy out of the city, but you can't take da city out of the gay boy... ha ha!

 

Here are some of my biggest music loves and influences (not already mentioned above) in no particular order...

 

Phillip Glass, Kate Bush, Brian Eno, Ladytron, Simian Mobile Disco, Bjork, Erykah Badu, LCD Soundsystem, Cut Copy, Santigold, Thunderheist, Laurie Anderson, Golden Filter, Hot Chip, Adult, Dragonette, Tori Amos, Cassius, The Gossip, Klaxons, Joni Mitchell, Little Boots, The Juan Maclean, Black Ghosts, The Knife, Kid Sister, Amanda Blank, Cazwell, Stereo MC's, Air, CSS, PJ Harvey, Stereolab, Dubtribe Sound System, Eurythmics, Holy Ghost!, Joanna Newsom, Jamiroquai, The Twelves, Marina & the Diamonds, We Have Band, Yoko Ono, Penguin Prison, Everything But the Girl, Chemical Brothers, Miami Horror, Missy Elliot, Hey Champ, Ali Love, Glass Candy, Ladyhawke, Prince, Scissor Sisters, The XX, Yelle, Monarchy, Lykke Li, The Love Supreme, Gary Numan, Fever Ray, Chromeo, Florence + The Machine, Pascal Gabriel, Matias Aguayo, Junior Boys, Le Tigre, Miike Snow, Soft Cell, Tiga, YACHT, Of Montreal, The Presets, Stevie Nicks, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Roisin Murphy, Metronomy, Fujiya & Miyagi, Jem, Groove Armada, Moby, Goldfrapp, Fischerspooner, Chromatics, Feist, Annie, In Flagranti, Peaches, Loretta Lynn, Tim Simenon, New Young Pony Club, Sleater Kinney, Zero 7, Midnight Juggernauts, Beth Orton, Morcheeba, B-52's, Emmylou Harris, Yeasayer, Jenny Lewis, Clinic, Danielle Dax, The Phenomenal Handclap Band, Bongwater, La Roux, David Byrne, Fiona Apple, Supreme Beings of Leisure, Grace Jones, Hank Williams, Mindy Smith, White Stripes, Jenny Wilson, Yaz, Johnny Cash, Uffie, St. Vincent, Spiritualized, Kraftwerk, Miss Kittin, Nightmares On Wax, Sheila Chandra, Lucinda Williams, Tom Jones..... and on and on...

 

As long as it makes my heart sing or groove or krunk...

It's all good... ;-) "