MUSICIAN is my current solo noise/music project. Some time in 2015 I had the inspiration that given all the drone, noise, and industrial projects in recent years whose names were singular nouns denoting professions or roles – i.e. Developer, Theologian, Actuary, Contraktor, et al – that the ultimate project name of this kind would be Musician. Initially I intended it to be strictly a harsh noise project, with a heavy wall emphasis, but like most of my solo project monikers it eventually started to incorporate whatever other musical directions felt relevant at any time; so in this sense Musician is just the latest phase in a continuum stretching back through Distant Trains, Chuck Hoffman, Ozob, and Flight Attendants.
There are other significances to the name besides. A fair bit of the material has incorporated commentary on and satirization of the idea of a musician and the acts of performing and creating underground music; the trope of the noise artist as a failed musician; and the absurdities and obstacles surrounding pursuing musicianship in contemporary society. The genericity of the name also carries intention, as if the person making the music is anonymous and interchangeable, sometimes expressed by writing it in the form of a shell script variable as $MUSICIAN, as if to say “insert musician here”. There is also a backhanded identitarian motivation to, as ostensibly a boring middle-class white male, presenting my artistic persona in the most nondescript terms possible. In addition to all this, I adopted a fascination with Peavey Musician amplifiers, and have acquired and made use of a few of them in the project.
MUSICIAN’s online home, besides this page, is a bandcamp account at musician-noise.bandcamp.com. Most if not all of MUSICIAN’s recorded output can be found there, along with selections from earlier solo projects and side projects along the way.