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This is grungy, lo-fi, D-I-Y, Garage Rock. Dark, Elemental, Grinding with Existential Lyrics set to Heavy, Dark, Grinding, and Droning music. Features lots of Guitar, Bass, Drums, and Wet and Drippy Vocals that give voice to the darkness that lies behind all things.
A must for every underground music aficianodo’s collection. Classic Late 1990’s sensitivity. Singer/Songwriter/Guitarist Chris Miller is from the Kurt Cobain generation, except Chris locked himself away in a treehouse in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in America… where he continues to dabble in Flow-of-Consciousness creativity mixed with a masterful songwriting sensitivity, all done in DoublePlanet.com’s patented (well, not really) No-Fi Production Aesthetic, which blends noise and breathy, buried foley-type sounds into the production. The songwriting really shines here with this conceptual, sub-terranian masterpiece of underground modern rock.
This is a good example of Creative Guitar Mastery learning series author Chris Miller in action. Be sure to catch sideshowfreak™’s improvisational writing and production which brings a raw, unpolished energy to the music and a feel that is definitely original.
Hear sideshowfreak™ right here! Right now! -->
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Chris Miller, creator and frontman for sideshowfreak™ expounds the history of lo-fi, the No-Fi aesthetic, and unfettered creativity in this short article.
A Few Notes from the Creator and Frontman of sideshowfreak™
An Introduction to The No-Fi Aesthetic (Trademark, Chris Miller)
Hi Chris Miller here, one person immersed in guitar, rock/roll music and creativity-at-all-costs for long enough to have dissappeared into obscurity several times now!
It all started over 2o years ago in a garage, my parents garage as a matter of fact. There was always the latest consumer-musician level technology around that old dusty garage. We had old 4-track, ¼ inch reel-to-reel machines when they came out, and cassette 4-tracks when they were new too.
We were always experimenting, putting stuff down on tape. Even when it was a single channel “shoebox” recorder. This introduced me to the whole concept of thinking on tape, creating music on-the-fly. More often times than not, this was noise. Sometimes it bordered on being scary even!
The sideshowfreak™ concept came about years later, back in the early 1990s when I was in another band (who shall remain unnamed). sideshowfreak™ mutated from a set of songwriting experiments I embarked upon about the time that I decided to concentrate less on guitar and more on songs, songform, and the whole culture of being a songwriter.
Hungry for flow-of consciousness meaning that can be interpreted on so many, even qabalistical levels, this weird set of songs centers around a sort of roadside attraction sensitivity to life, love, and all the little things that haunt a human passing through this world. An intertwined psychodrama grew out of an 1800s theme, sideshows and snakeoil peddlers that seemd to filter from all the material I researched to draw my mythos from.
I even wrote storyboards, characters, plots, maps, all based on this original set of songs that went on to be rotated around the sountheast on college radio. Who knows, maybe someday...
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The sideshowfreak™ legend lives on even today as occassionally something knocks on the door of my subconscious and that must make its way out, in the form of a song done in this style of primitive production and improvisational songwriting. This is my creative channel for these ideas that don't have any other outlet. This is what sideshowfreak™ is today.
I put this CD and lyric sheet together as an introduction to this style of songwriting and production. These songs are all written in this style. The songs are all one-off, on-the-spot, almost improvisationally made up and produced on the spot.
The idea on these songs is to go from nothing to a finished demo of a song in the shortest path possible. I start with a riff on the guitar, ask myself where this goes, start immediately forcing words to fit the thing, and write and produce a song all right there on-the-spot while I am recording it. I go from nothing to a song in just a few hours. These songs are all made up right then and there, the music, the words, everything.
I don’t let drums get in my way either, and have been known to stick one cheap mic up in them and go on and record the part! More often than not, even when I later remaster these songs with better production, there is an energy to these earlier versions that cannot be duplicated.
They have a flow-of-consciousness style and a rough, garage-rock demo sound that seems true to me at least to some coherent creative vision. Maybe imperfect on some levels, to-be-sure, they have an edgy validity that remains true to our rock roots.
This collection is here in the hopes that someone will find some meaning, some joy, even a little beauty in this simple form of songcraft.
So I lay these songs down here for your musical enjoyment. Please, let me know what you think.
Chris Miller
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