I made most of Saints and Strangers at night, in a basement in Virginia, after long days working at a hardware store. The basement was the one place I could be loud without bothering anyone, and somewhere in those late hours the album took shape – eight songs that swing between the loudest and the quietest parts of me. Some nights that meant a fuzzed-out guitar and a drum kit going full volume. Other nights it meant turning everything off and sitting alonesong one melody until it felt true.
My first solo cassette was recorded in 1998. It was awful. I had some good ideas for a kid, but no talent at all, maybe except a knack for lyrics, and a bit of a gift for classical guitar and bass, definitely not for singing. I was also interested in much different music than most people my age in Poland back then. That’s why it took 4 years to form my first band in 2002. To take the shortcut, it took 9 more years to release my studio debut album “Second Hand Man”. In 2012, I started Sauer Adler, my second real band. And to take the shortcut again, in 2022, I formed Psychedelic Mayhem, and in 2024, I formed Bezkwit. Along the way, I also jammed, recorded, played, composed, and improvised whenever and wherever possible, with whoever was available at the time. That, through many shortcuts, takes us directly into the once-very-futuristic year 2026 (certainly around 1998).
I often think about injustice in life. Sometimes, circumstances turn out so that the life you lived yesterday no longer exists today.
I could feel it when I left my hometown to go to university and left my closest friends behind. I still miss them very much because we can’t see them often.
Continue readingby K Gocebe a.k.a. The Strange & Odd Secrets Club
What is The Strange & Odd Secrets Club? It’s not a club, or even a band. It’s really just one person – Me. Hello there! I try to put an emphasis on making my songs sound like a collective effort rather than the solo project that it truly is. Through some “social experimenting” with other musicians I found that I work much better in solitude. Part of this is due to my insecurity surrounding vulnerable lyrical and arrangement ideas, but also because I love taking on the personal responsibility of creating each element of a song.
by Tuffy Brazil of STROMBLE FIX
It all started in 1990 when five teenagers formed a new punk band. In fact, STROMBLE FIX was a merger of two bands that rehearsed door-to-door in the local youth center in the Ruhr area of Germany.
We played many shows in the early 90s and recorded our songs on 8-track or 16-track tape machines in a friend’s studio whenever we could afford to spend a weekend. The music was published on compact cassettes, and there was a culture of sharing tapes with other bands or even taping tapes to get the music heard. Mail orders these days worked so that you requested a printed catalog first and then ordered your vinyl or cassettes by writing a letter.
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Hi, I’m Raging Flowers, a singer-songwriter-producer from Auckland, New Zealand. My primary instrument is the electric guitar. I make jazzy self-help indie pop that celebrates the diversity of feelings. My music is about truthfulness, exploration, and hope.
My music career has had an unusual start. I’ve been a long-time music learner, but I decided to pursue a career in tech. I studied Computer Science and had a career as a Software Engineer. I worked for some of the top software companies in New Zealand. I was a star Software Engineer in various fields, including music, blockchain, and AI. Back in my programming days, my ambition was to run a small business of my own.
Continue readingby Liv Luce
Writing music has been a constant in my life. I was the kind of kid who sang constantly to myself, my friends, my parents, stuffed animals, anyone, anything. For a while, I had a pen pal with whom I’d exchange song lyrics. I’m pretty sure there was one about a baby swallow I tried and failed to nurse back to health in my parents’ attic.
I began taking piano lessons around the age of nine. Being an introvert, I spent many a school break in the music rooms playing and composing songs. Then, aged 12, I plucked up the courage to approach other musicians about forming a band. It was then that Suzie (guitarist in my first band, Caliber) introduced me to Radiohead and Nirvana. I learned bass and have been in bands ever since.
Continue readingby Jonas Franck a.k.a. Corpse Feet
Why call it Corpse Feet? No one, to my knowledge, can survive death, so I guess we’re all just corpse feet walking until we lay…
Here’s how it went.
It was in the late 70s, and I was just a few years old. I had seen a man with his guitar on our black and white TV, probably Elvis Jailhouse Rock, and immediately wanted to be that. So, I grabbed a tennis racket at a birthday party and got up on the table to do my first show.
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Hi, my name’s Jamie Hutchings; I’m a singer, songwriter, guitarist, percussionist, and sometime improviser and producer. I’m based in Sydney, Australia.
Music was a given in my family household as my dad was a woodwind session cat. He’s 83 now, but he still gigs here and there, but as kids, it was his bread and butter. So all of us inherited his musicality in some form, but still (particularly with my brother and I), we found ourselves gravitating more and more towards rawness and originality over professionalism and technique. I was looking through my mum and dad’s record collection the other night, and it’s almost exclusively Frank Sinatra records. Sinatra is amazing, but the overexposure to music in a show-biz format perhaps contributed to us going in a different direction!
Continue readingby Sonic Ctrl
We believe in following our whims and passions through music as our creative outlet. We are accountable to no one but ourselves and use ‘Sonic Ctrl’ as our platform to indulge our feelings and emotions, whether funny or serious. We are going wherever our musical muse takes us. For us, it’s not a contradiction to write an insanely catchy pop-punk song and next write a groovy emotional tune because they all come from our personal experiences, outlooks, and attitudes. Likened to someone listening to Ray Charles at one moment but blasting The Chats the next.