Joe Monica

8/6/04

Mill Valley, CA

Dear listener,

How about I tell you a little about my process. You'll get a sense of who I am from this and how I approach making "music." As for a personal bio/history of Joe Monica, there's not much to tell. I just enjoy creating songs, using it as an artistic outlet and a way to cope with life. I don't have any delusions of grandeur. I recognize I won't be the lead act for Neil Diamond any time soon. My music is just one voice, among millions. I appreciate it whenever one person gives it a listen, even if they hate it. I think that's all any of us want, when you come down to it: to be heard, to know for that short moment our existence and creativity has been acknowledged.

It all started nearly four years ago: me, my spanking new bargain-basement emachines computer, and some mixing software. I created music at a fevered pitch. It was a new opportunity for me to express myself and crikey it was easy. I was burnt out on writing and painting, and my job wasn't providing me the creative outlet I needed. But alas those fast days of creation are gone. Now it's quality not quantity.

Strangely, Sobriety and Thoughts of Doom is one of my best tracks, and it was created in one night in a drunken stupor. (That might explain the gnarly levels when I listened to it the next day.) But except for that gem, most of my work is painstakingly pieced together. I flip through my loop library and listen in, figure out what sounds I want to trash depending on my mood or the lyrics I've written, and load them into sound forge. I want to tweak, destroy, mangle and apply my signature to every noise that's in my songs. If you don't alter those stock loops you're just selling glowsticks (IMHO).

Once I've assembled a mish-mash of 20 or so loops (including my vocals... sometimes), it's time for the experimentation. Blending them, tweaking pitch, extending and shortening durations, and if it still doesn't fit, smashing that delete key and trying another. Some loops seem perfect after I've trashed 'em up, but once I try to load those suckers up with drums or synth, the track dies. So you gotta let go. It's hard not to use a loop I just spent an hour distorting, but I'll save it for the next song.

My lyrics are sparse, sometimes inaudible. But you don't have to hear them, you don't have to understand them. It's part of the music, like another instrument floating in the track. I like blending my vocals deep into the noise. If you catch a word or two in Debris in the Wasteland, great, just don't hate me for what I have to say in that one.

Please give one or two of these a listen, acknowledge I'm here, and I hope you enjoy it. If not, I'll try better next time.

Joe