Dan Easley

  

Dan Easley was born near Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A. in 1979. He's lived in the Shenandoah Valley since 1989. He excelled in academics throughout childhood. In early adolescence he abandoned his natural gifts in science and mathematics for studies in religion, psychology, music, and poetry. This nearly killed him.

After ten years in public radio and television, Easley has spent the last few years dedicating himself to music writing and recording, performance and production. Equipped with a portable multi-track recording rig, a Volkswagen camper, and a bevy of musical instruments, he creates and facilitates auditory art in a variety of natural and artificial settings.

available for-hire:

  • music performance, composition, education
  • songwriting & tunesmithing
  • audio production/engineering

as heard in:

  • The Shakes - homebrewed country, folk and rock with Mark Lane & Crystal Shrewsbury
  • The Kindly Ones - experimental electronic music with Frédéric Dorée
  • Ragged Mountain String Band - old-time music
  • The Rockinghammers - old-time string band
  • The Burnt Possum Poets - spoken word, poetry, stories, songs, improvised music
  • performing as DJ Banjo - a synthesis of old-time fiddle tunes and electronic dance music
  • also with The Lotus Eaters old-time string band (2007-2009), and Easley and Deaton (2003-2005)

instruments played:

  • voice, whistling, kazoo
  • tinwhistle, recorder, soprano and alto saxophones
  • piano, accordion, hammond organ, fender rhodes
  • six-string and tenor guitars, mandolin, banjo (clawhammer style)
  • fiddle, cello, upright bass
  • electric guitar and bass, chapman stick
  • trapset, miscellaneous percussion
  • oscillators, filters, samplers, modulators, sequencers, etc.

A few of Dan's aesthetic influences include Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian film director; Syd Barrett, Bob Dylan, and Peter Gabriel; Bela Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, and Wolfgang Mozart; William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder; Arthur Rimbaud; the Dada artists; the Marx Bros.; the Appalachian Mountains.

The Soleaux Tapes were produced in the middle of the night at KRBD-FM, a community radio station in Ketchikan, Alaska, when Dan was 18. It's half-an-hour of instrumental music with wordless vocals, guitar, and casio keyboard.

The Suites for Machines (numbers one and two) were constructed using old-school trackers and terrifically cheap software synthesizers.

Downtown Rocktown, an acoustic presentation of original songs and contemplations, was recorded in the middle of the night at the old studios of WEMC-FM, which was at the time a small college station in Harrisonburg, Virginia. It marks the beginning of Dan's recorded efforts in pop song, and the end of his surreptitious recording in small radio stations. Nathan Garrett plays upright bass, flute, mandolin, and viola on a few tracks.

solipschism, sundowning, and surreptition track a journey in search of a destination. The strong-willed quest for electro-experimental exisistentialist pop song form perhaps distracted from a more pure or useful aesthetic. These releases present Dan with a serious quandary: he no longer agrees with the sentiments expressed in their lyrics; however, they must retain some meaning or value despite. At any rate, records on the internet don't go out of print.

Last Days on Wolfe Street is a bit of a return to Rocktown: a stripped down set of instruments, a moratorium on synthetic drums, and an attempt to dispose of gratuitous wordplay and effect. It features Dan's debut on drumset.

On his 31st birthday Dan released a pair of records: a set of mostly synthetic/electronic, mostly instrumental pieces called November, and a selection of original and traditional folk-rock songs - somewhat a follow-up to Wolfe Street - entitled The Farmer's Daughter (and other tall tales).

As of July 2011 Dan is writing a song cycle based on the narrative works of George Orwell, recording with The Shakes and The Kindly Ones, and continuing study and practice of Appalachian folk music.