"Featuring the percussion of handclaps and sticks, multi-layered voices and harmonies, and a range of soundscapes that moves from whimsical and celebratory to haunting and apocalyptic, Raw Songbursts Volume I is an exercise in the minimalist embellishment of raw song DNA. Utilizing only one microphone plugged into an iPad with limited recording capabilities, each song was harvested from the air and then attended to with great care. There was also little pause granted for excessive deliberation during the recording process. Each track had to reach a place where the movement felt complete, but each movement had to be swiftly resolved. It would have confused the process to try and go back and change or redo anything after the moment of the initial “burst” had passed. A few of the tracks were actually long existing songs that finally found a home here in the company of the other songbursts, but the same swift process of song embellishment was attended to when “resurrecting” these bursts to be recorded. The whole collection of songs came to life as a bouquet of distinct moments that were expressed in a series of intuitive musical decisions, and the full album remains as an aural document to be shared, passed around, and experienced."

- Starlight*
August 29, 2021

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PRESS RELEASE FROM OUTSIDER'S SOIRÉE :

"THINK

Brian Wilson, Bobby McFerrin, and a little bit of Leonard Cohen.

ALSO

Tom Waits’ “Real Gone”, P.J. Harvey’s “4-Track Demos”, and Paul McCartney’s “McCartney.”

BUT

There is no drum-kit, and there is no bass.

YET

There are SOME bass sounds, and there are SOME percussive sounds.

AND

There are no guitars.

BUT

There are two songs that feature keyboard sounds.

SO

All of the rest is VOICE.

RAW SONGBURSTS VOLUME I

An exercise in the embellishment of raw song DNA as a series of intuitive decisions thrown across the sound canvas in the burst of a moment.

ADDITIONALLY

Every song is Homemade and Handcrafted with great care in our Sound Studio to provide you, the Listener, with a Pure and Intimate Sound that reveals the Raw essence of each Song. All of the Voices and Handclaps used for this Recording originated from a 100% Organic Human Person."

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Recorded in a bedroom near U.S. Highway 101 in the Mission District in San Francisco, CA from April 16 to July 8, 2021, Raw Songbursts Volume I tells the story of one human confronting themself in the presence of one microphone and a very basic multi-track recording setup. Mixing and "Mastering" (if it can be called that) was completed by this same human from July to the first part of September in the same year. Many "mistakes" were made, and you will get to hear ALL of them in this RAW musical experience. If you pressed the "play" button, then you are already listening to the story.

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