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Posts Tagged ‘Music’

No One Hears a Zen Busker

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I’m proud to announce (or I regret to inform you, depending on your musical tastes) that I have yet another album out.

Salon de la Guerre’s 36th album, No One Hears a Zen Busker, has arrived on the streaming services. For whatever reason, I’m enjoying an extremely prolific phase in my songwriting and composing career. I’ve released three albums in the last four months and I have two more dropping in the next few weeks.

I know it’s hard to keep track of, and I’m sorry if my curating skills aren’t the equal of my ability to keep churning music out as if by fire hose.

The latest set is (mostly) acoustic folk songs. I like composing on guitar, but I’ve had technical problems (including the death of my most expensive beloved microphone) that kept me from recording acoustic guitar properly for a while, which is why I haven’t released such an album since 2017, when I dropped Keep Your Slut Lamp Burning. Like that collection, this new one is about eccentric characters and folk heroes, both modern and classic. It includes Americana experiments (including a song inspired by Ambrose Bierce) and meditations on despair and joy. The usual Salon de la Guerre territory.

The album is now available on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon, Bandcamp and Pandora, among other places music is streamed. Unfortunately, I still do not offer physical CDs, which would be too expensive and make this little side endeavor of mine a bit too expensive to continue.

Even as I write this blog, I’m already thinking ahead to the release of my next album, which is coming out next Monday. That one is another detour into classical music and finds me continuing in my quest to play in the fields of Prokofiev. I’ll let you know when it arrives on the streaming services.

Until then, please enjoy a sample of No One Hears a Zen Busker. As always, the music was written, performed and produced by me, Eric Randolph Rasmussen, and it was recorded at my home studio in New York City in the early months of 2024. I also took the cover photo.

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Salon de la Guerre’s New Alt-Rock Album

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Aren’t you lucky, you darlings! Salon de la Guerre’s 35th album is here, and it’s a lot of fun!

The album is called Citizen Wet Smack and it features some hard-rocking tunes such as “Scooter Impossible,” “Fred Jr.,” and “Once Evil, Now Retired.” The songs cover familiar Salon de la Guerre ground, with vignettes of characters you might find in short fiction: small-time criminals, white collar scammers, spoiled rich kids and unethical philosophers.

As of this week, the album is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Pandora, YouTube and Bandcamp, among other streaming services. You can also use my stuff to make TikTok videos, if you’re so inclined. (My old song “Funny Drunk” is evidently popular for that sort of thing.)

About the title: “Wet smack” is an old-timey phrase for “wet blanket” or misfit. I use it a lot in my novels when I can.

The instrumentation on the new album is weird (Salon de la Guerre fans should expect no less by now). I include a lot of original Fender strat guitar performances alongside prefab guitar sounds generated on my iPhone GarageBand. I confess, this app has a hard rock guitar timbre that I quite like, and which I can manipulate in Logic Pro X. I understand that some purists probably shudder at that thought. But as I’ve said before, I’m not a musical purist about anything. I don’t care where songs come from as long as I’ve got an instrument or machine that gives me easy access to my own melodic ideas. Sometimes for this reason I get some snickers about my production quality from friends and critics. On the bright side, I’ve squeezed out a few hundred songs by doing things my way (I’ve got three more albums dropping soon, and my total song count is now just under 500 titles).

I noticed after I submitted my music to a paid review site a few months ago that a good reviewer can spot my influences pretty easily. The critic who wrote about my last album, Even Toy Dogs Get the Blues, thought he could hear some Peter Gabriel in my voice. I accept that view, though I don’t mind stating my influences outright, especially for my latest work. It’s pretty much all Sonic Youth, Joy Division and the Pixies. So there you go!

I’m also responsible for the cover art this time around, since my preferred collaborator has been busy. The plaster bust photos were purchased from a photo wire and taken by someone named Parsadanov.

I will likely do this kind of album again in the future, but the three albums I’ve got coming up are all very different: one’s folk, one’s electronic, one’s classical.

But for now, please enjoy a sample of the new album below, and buy it if you’d like!

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My Next Alt-Rock Album, ‘Stereoisomer,’ To Hit The Market Soon

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , on March 20, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Stereoisomer

Salon de la Guerre is releasing its 32nd album in a few weeks. It’s titled Stereoisomer, and I’m sharing the title track and a few others on Soundcloud today.

Most of the album is unabashedly loud, raunchy, guitar-driven hard rock. After releasing my previous album in November, I set about trying to get a brighter guitar sound than I’d previously achieved with my home recording equipment, and I finally found the magic formula. After that, I knocked out most of the basic tracks in a couple of weekends in December. But then I had to figure out how my voice was going to get around all these bigger electric thrashing sounds (a problem I’ve heard discussed by rockers as diverse as Sting and Iggy Pop). There’s a practical reason heavy metal singers use loud, overblown voices, and I’ve gradually figured out what it is: Big Guitar doesn’t leave much room in the sound picture, and the best singers have to float above it. Then there are people like me who have to fake it.

I also had to figure out which lyrics best suited this particular instrumental attack I’d come up with. That took me a few months. As it happens, there are plenty of things in the world to be angry about (I’m looking at you, Russia) and turning your despair into angry expression is an emancipating act that sometimes only art affords you.

“Stereoisomer”

I shed the costume and now I’m chased by snow drops
Had to shed my parachute gear
Had to let go of the octopus gravity
A Dutch girl crying wish you were here 

Blown out face of a Jugendstil building
Looks like we landed in the zone
I’m a nationless man finding the pins in keyholes
A traitor with a rubber for a soul

Wore a pig costume
Hair done page
Now I enter the metafiction stage
Don’t know love from rage
The human cell is acting its age

Behold the age of aromatic polymers
Benzene rings and nylon legs
Sometimes it’s scary the way things crystallize
Show you the girl, the life you left behind

Did you hear the propellant stop burning
That’s when the V-2 started to fall
See it etch the tomato sky of morning
Hope we live to be amazed by it all

Wore a pig costume
You’re on my cape
Never left the re-entry stage
But the eukaryotic cell plays
Plastic man in a plastic age 

And when I broke, broke through the wall
I found a chemical lab and scored it all
Please send word to Truman
I’m sorry that I’m AWOL

Copyright 2022 Eric Randolph Rasmussen

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My First Music Video: ‘Lanternfly’

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , on November 23, 2021| 2 Comments »

Salon de la Guerre has released its first music video. It’s for the song “Lanternfly,” which appears on the album Wings Made of Cash. The video was directed by yours truly.

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My New Album ‘Hugs For Mountains’ Is Now Available

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 13, 2021| Leave a Comment »

The 26th album by Salon de la Guerre, Hugs for Mountains, is now available on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, Pandora and other services where music is streamed or downloaded.

The album is a melding of electronica and folk music, gothic rock and New Wave, inspired by acts such as Four Tet, the Talking Heads, Lene Lovich, Gia Margaret, Public Image Limited and Throbbing Gristle. I’ve previously used aggressive sampling and noise in my albums, but generally limited that to experimental instrumental albums such as Liberty and Golem Vs. Duende. In Hugs for Mountains, I add lyrics and put these noises and samples in pop and folk music contexts. Some of the samples are of musical instruments (like my now returned rented saxophone), while others are developed from household items like notebooks and vacuum cleaners and my own breath.

I made this album concurrently with my next album, Digital Moon, which I hope to release next week. As always, the songs were written performed, produced and arranged by me, and I recorded them in my New York City home studio on GarageBand for iPhone.

Check out a sample of the new album at Bandcamp:

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Lost In the Country

Posted in Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 13, 2021| Leave a Comment »

There’s money in your letters
There’s money in your stones
And when the angel came to collect
There was money in your bones

And he knew by the purple in your blood
And knew by the color of your woes
That you rode across the country
Driven by anger alone

Lost in the country
On the higher plains
Nothing left but ideals
And your bodily remains

It’s in the black of your lungs
And in the anger of your stew
That the desecrating angel and the revenue service
Were both out to get you

And your anger was a cross
That your children had to bear
The woman on the plains
With matted blood in her hair

Lost in the country
With a battered wife
Anger animates your bones
And gives you life

And the desecrating angel
And the government revenue knew
You were an angel of anger
And away you flew

(Lyrics for “Lost in the Country” from the 2019 album Bleed by Salon de la Guerre. Written, performed and produced by Eric Randolph Rasmussen.)

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Are You Ready?

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , on April 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Salon de la Guerre’s new punk album, Digital Moon, will be available in the next few weeks. Thirteen loud, fast songs about life in our confused times. Some of it I played on guitar, some of it is fabricated with my clever software.

I am still polishing the album, but this is what marketers call “creating pre-awareness.” So consider yourselves pre-aware.

As usual, all the songs were written, performed and produced by yours truly.

The album will be available on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, Bandcamp and other platforms where music is (still) sold.

Here’s a sample:

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‘Funny Drunk’

Posted in Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , on February 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »

From Salon de la Guerre’s 2018 album, Yipano.

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My New Jazz Album

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 30, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Within the next month or so, Salon de la Guerre will be releasing two new albums. One is best described as an “art country” album. More on that later. The other is my first album dedicated to jazz and it’s mostly in the Miles Davis-John Coltrane mood, though there are a couple of curveball songs.

Why did I do this? Why do I keep straying from the garage rock that is Salon de la Guerre’s main order of business? Well, there are a few reasons. One is that playing around in different genres helps me innovate and come up with new ideas. Next, I had built up a collection of melodies that didn’t really fit into pop or punk or rock songs very well. After enough of them piled up, I decided to do the right thing with them.

Then there were a few mundane, practical reasons. As regular readers know, I’ve made a few short films; for years, I have had to hide one of my student works from 2006 because I had put a popular Louis Armstrong song on the soundtrack. It was going to be a huge burden to pay for the rights to this song every year, and so I tried to think of a way I could capture the spirit of the piece and make my own jazz song to save the film, “Scrabble Rousers,” from oblivion. I took a huge risk and tried to score it using my own saxophone playing (something I’ve done only a little of since high school). Once I had the sax in my hands, I thought I might as well go all in and record an entire jazz album.

Sorry for the long-winded explanation. The upshot is that I’m fairly proud of the result, which is called Hot Tears.

Attached is a song from the album, which is almost completed.

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My New Album

Posted in Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , on March 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Golem Vs. DuendeIn a few weeks, I will release my 23rd album, Golem Vs. Duende. It comprises 10 movements of microtonal experiments and musique concrète.

For this new album, I took iPhone samples of my home environment and the New York City subway; it employs the percussive use of scissors, pots and pans, fences, doors, escalators and all other sorts of found objects that allow me to play the wannabe microtones my piano and guitar would not. I just recently discovered Maestro Harry Partch and his ingenious system of tones. However, I have not developed my own musical notation system nor have I built my own instruments with 43 pitches per octave. So I had to make due with playing the non-instruments around me. Then I mixed back into it my more traditional melodies on piano and synthesizer.

If I were to continue on this course, I would likely move it back around to pop music or work the approach into some type of roots music. I don’t have the musical training, but I have strategies. If this is your first time listening to my music, I should remind you that I’m all over the map, and that most of these experiments feed my alternative rock albums.

In this time of despair, I still see endless possibility. Though my family feels a little cooped up during the quarantine, we are creative and have plenty of things to do at home. So that’s what I’m going to depend on in these crazy times: My imagination.

The album was composed and performed by me at my home studio (and on location) in early 2020. I also did the cover art.

Listen to a sample of the album here:

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