Citizen Nowhere is Da7e Gonzale’s sonic diary music project.

All downloads and news are available at CitizenNowhere.com

All subpages at Listen Or Don’t also include the individual track download option.

Hello friends, family, strangers and – of course – my reminiscing future self,

Today is the day I stop making new material for the project dubbed Citizen Nowhere. I’ve been “working” on it for awhile, so it seemed fitting to write a little bit about it. I’ll try to stay clear of hyperbolae and make this brief, because the MP3s certainly say enough.

During high school in Boulder, Colorado, I was in a band with a bunch of my friends and we made joke music. I think it was a great experience for all of us as well as an essential experience for each of us. Since then, a few of the members of Serious Bob (that was the band’s name) continue to be active in music and a few have moved on. Two of the three founding members of Serious Bob are now married, which makes them, like, 40% less funny. The third, alone, bitter founding member is me.

I took to college in New York pretty well. It turned out the most stressful academic part of the whole four years was the application process. Freshman year for me was mostly spent having the college experience in one way or another, which meant a bit of skipped class and huge swaths of free time stretching across my week. You can only go to the Met so many times in one month, so my interest in producing music on my computer became a way to spend my time.

Serious Bob had dabbled in varied styles of recording. The first couple songs were recorded on a mini-cassette recorder. Our first three songs released on CD to the student population were recorded with a cheap microphone plugged into a PC running Acid Pro 3.0. At NYU, I bought a cheap Logitech USB mic to plug into my Dell running pirated Acid Pro 4.0 with some CDs of licensed loops. My roommate happened to be a talented guitarist and the first Citizen Nowhere album was made a hybrid of electronica weirdness and trippy stoner/jam guitar. I named it “Alone In Americaland” and myself “Citizen Nowhere,” because in 2003 I knew little of subtlety.

Something weird happened where I kept making music while spending my walks to class listening to Citizen Nowhere and Serious Bob. The songs each had memories attached to them and I had discovered how much more potent the emotions attached to a memory could be when married to sound.

Yes, that sounds pretentious. It sounded that way to me then, hence the second album’s title: “Pretentious.” That album is awful if your name isn’t Da7e Gonzales or Nate Patterson.

Two albums in as many semesters gave me the bright idea of doing 8 albums over four years of college, thereby creating a sonic diary of that period of time.

Then, I fell in love and mismanaged that love, like a person happens to do when their hormones are raging and they’re living states away from their past self. That lead to something of a concept album Sophomore year called “III: Sin Seer.” It was electro-poppy and pleasant, though sad because it followed a specific narrative.

The fourth album went the way of Led Zeppelin and doesn’t really have a title. It’s cover just displays my split lip from when I had a tall boy Coors Light thrown at my face with the three tattoos I had at the time as the title. It’s textually referred to as “IV” and in retrospect, I probably made it so I’d have something to listen to while ignoring any personal drama in my life. Nothing on that album is as glaringly personal and – as a result – it was a departure and a bit more tonally light. There’s almost no singing on it. “IV” was released in 2004.

I finished college without releasing another Citizen Nowhere album. There was stuff recorded in there, but it never boiled up to the surface in a pack of easily downloadable MP3s. Then, in 2008, I realized that I was in the middle of New York Life Transition #2 – realizing that college is over and no one is going to tell you when “real life” starts. I was gossip blogging a ridiculous amount for too little money and it was killing the relationship I was in.

She left and Citizen Nowhere returned with an album called “Valhalla.” That album is weird because it represents a transition in recording techniques. I had made the transition to Mac products and Acid Pro hadn’t followed. I’d been doing video projects, so my hard drive space was taken up with Garageband instead of Pro Tools and Propellerhead Reason instead of Ableton Live. BUT, half the tracks on that album come from Acid Pro 3.0 experiments my neighbor Ty and I had worked on before Serious Bob was established. I just added vocals to them. It was a weird way of sonically reaching into the past and pulling something familiar from two “homes” ago into the present.

The sounds I was able to make in a room by myself with the new recording setup lead me to get a M-Audio Midi Controller and a Blu-Snoflake USB mic. With those last and relatively cheap components, I was suddenly able to manufacture a wider variety of sounds. The Citizen Nowhere project re-opened, basically on the same schedule as the previous 4 albums were released.

“Out of Insight, Out of Mind” was the next collection. It came out of me at the same time I started working on another, still secret project with more pop sensibility than Citizen Nowhere had previously had. A lot of that sound bleeded over into the 6^th CN album and OoIOoM is still one of my favorite things to listen to. It’s short, sweet and you can kind of tell that I’m happy despite feeling like I was barely able to hold my life together.

“The Solitary Vice” was the 7^th album and it’s an album for winter, headphones and rainy nights. My blogging “career” was beginning and I start realizing that my lifestyle had become based around my desk in my apartment. It struck me as odd that I would spend free time at that same desk, still by myself, recording music. Hence, “The Solitary Vice,” old slang for masturbation.

It was around the time that “The Solitary Vice” was released that my friend Nate suggested to me I finish the original 8-album plan. I’ve adopted that goal, not because I think I’m going to stop making music for my enjoyment and narcissistic nostalgia, but because Citizen Nowhere ended up being more than just “Dave’s solo project.” It became a sonic scrapbook; snippets of me flailing in my own life trying to find my footing, feeling like I’m being beaten back. I’d like to let that feeling go. I’d like to end Citizen Nowhere.

And I have.

Today sees the release of CNVIII, the last original pack of songs under the Citizen Nowhere name and style. It’s called “Recessed” and closes out the narrative of me by following my thoughts through the Recession of ‘09, where I was unemployed, going poor and watching a lot of politics on TV out of a hopeless feeling that I wasn’t in control of any of it.

Obviously, I get out alive in real life. Recessed ends differently. The album closes on “Just Find A Place To Fall Asleep,” which is a song about those moments where you wish you could sleep through a week, a month, a year and wake up in your life after all the difficult decisions have been made in your absence.

Citizen Nowhere doesn’t end with me taking responsibility for myself, because Citizen Nowhere as a project was never about the truth as much as it was like the amber that encases a mosquito that eventually becomes a T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

There will be a few more Citizen Nowhere releases, but just to make the material more accessible. In the coming year, I’ll most likely assemble a Compilation from the latter 4 albums and maybe that collection of B-Sides. B-Sides might not happen, because B-Sides might become something else. One of these days I’m going to take the plunge and try selling a project.

Thanks for reading, listening, loving and participating. It’s been fun for me, which I think was the point. If you enjoy anything you hear, that makes me happy, because it’s an awesome bonus.