The story of The Chill/Funk Trip starts back in 1998. I was living in Worcester Massachusetts, and my friends and I were all leaving, moving all over the country. I decided to make a tribute album called "Worcestergia" - my hope was to capture the feel of Worcester and encapsulate a vibe that we could take with us as a musical memento. To me, the feel of Worcester was a cross between a roller-skating rink and a minor league baseball game, which somehow translated to a solo Hammond B3 funk album with titles like "The AA Meeting Took All the Parking Spots."
Here's a sample of one of the songs from that album. This is from the song "Worcester Trashbag."
I thought that it was about 80% awesome and 20% ridiculous, but I figured most people would feel the opposite; an entire album of Hammond organ wasn't exactly mainstream.
Flash forward about 10 years, and I still had this feeling that there was something there, back from "Worcestergia" left unexplored. The idea of funk driven by organs and electric pianos wasn't unique, but in the intervening 10 years I had gotten into the triphop/downtempo sounds coming out of the UK (and other places), as well as the music of DJ's like DJ Shadow and Wax Tailor. I thought maybe I could make music that was part Zero7/Air, part Wax Tailor, part Funkadelic... and part Worcestergia.
I put together a couple more albums that I didn't really promote, mostly to get the sound just right. When I thought I had enough ideas and songs, "The Chill Funk Trip" was released (Feb '12), and it led to Made of Wood being named a "top 10 emerging artist" on Jango.com (Jango tells me that this is out of something like 20,000 artists). It's been featured on internet radio sites and podcasts, it gets played at some hip night spots, and it's gotten some really nice and thoughtful reviews from people who seem to take their music seriously, which is both cool and humbling.
A lot of people ask about how the music is made and what my process is. The reality is that it varies a lot track to track, but I always start with a mood or a vibe. My music is often trying to create a musical space, a landscape to get lost in. As for more nuts and bolts production techniques- it's all over the place and changes a lot song to song. I use every means I can think of to get drum sounds that sound just the way they should for the specific song, cool bass lines that work the way I want them to, and the sounds of classic synths from the 70s mixed with modern synth sounds. I play bass lines on my Hofner, on keyboards, whatever works. For me, the point is the sound, and I'll try different things to get there. In one song, I took a recording of a friend playing a sax line then cut it up, transposed it and made harmonies. Here's an example of that, before and after from "A Sleep and a Forgetting," original sax part was played by George Comerci, but it's not recognizable, probably even to him.
I'm hoping the music takes you to a cool place. Sometimes that place is funky, sometimes it's spacey, but hopefully the album is a cool ride start to finish, and you might feel like you're riding that plane from the album cover, sailing beyond the moon, to who knows where.
Here's the finished track "A Sleep and a Forgetting" where you can hear the saxes in their final form. This song uses almost everything I could come up with: a Wurlitzer organ, the Hofner, drums patches from a few different sources, synth sounds from an amazing thing called Synplant, some clavinet to keep it funky, and other synth and percussion sounds from about 5 different places.
Contact me if you want any more info. Also, thanks for supporting independent music!
All the best,
-D
