Dylan Houser - Dismal King

Recorded from January - March 2019.

Dylan Houser: guitars; loops; distortions; splicings; ice cream trucks

So far 2019 has been a very productive year. The combination of the Sony ICD-PX470 recorder (I'm not sponsored, I swear) and finally acquiring a looping pedal last summer (it only took me, what? 15 years?!) have opened up an entirely new can of worms for me, creatively speaking.

Nearly everything you hear on this album is a guitar, except for the last song, "Tinker Galute," which is a looped toy keyboard riff and manipulated noise coming from the well-aged toy, plus what sounds like the occasional radio interference from having so many things plugged in. I originally wasn't going to include it on the album, but I re-listened to it and laughed all the way through. It was too hilarious to NOT have it be the closing piece.

I've also started trying to incorporate odd timing signatures in my music again for the first time in over a decade. So far there seems to be a lot of 15/8 or 15/4 or 4/4+4/4+7/4 or whatever the heck it might be.

"Molting Riviera" is one of my favorite pieces that I've ever recorded. On that I used the "Rock On Esteban" acoustic-electric guitar that I had played at Apartment Music #29:

​Tracks 2 - 4 were recorded during the first week of March and then the entire album was mixed down and edited on March 8th.

The album cover is a found picture I had laying around while I was putting the album together. The cover, the album and track titles...basically everything came together very spontaneously, which is my preferred method. Nothing beats that, really.

Enough of my rambling: I HOPE YOU ENJOY LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM AS MUCH I AS I DID CREATING IT!!!

XOXOXOXOX