1. Ennui Somber (Intro)

2. Fantasies of Cold Beer, Warm Beach, Indifferent Breezes (feat. Nate Patterson)

3. Oh No, Pirates

4. Percoset Party

5. I Thought Things Would Be Different When We Met Again

6. 010101 (From The Future Instrumental)

7. Frantzgiving

8. breakbeat lullaby (Instrumental)

9. Feeling Useless

10. Buried Not Yet Dead

11. 01010101

12. Falling Birds (Instrumental)

13. We Are F*cking Around Now (Originally by Laine Rettmer)

14. What’s Smoking Who? (Soundtrack)

15. Troubling Dreams

16. DVD Menu

17. Things Must Get Better Than This (Instrumental)

18. 16-Bit World, 16-Bit Boss

19. I Feel The Change Becoming (Instrumental)

Download: [ZIP] 93.1MB

The below might be the new instrumentals cover and title. I might switch it up again.

Right now, the mix down version is about an hour long:

And here’s a real pretty ballad:

dontdownloadme “I Thought Things Would Be Different When We Met Again” by Citizen Nowhere off Citizen Nowhere, non canonical, purple & smoke

On 6/25/2009 I made a “non canonical” cover that was so cool-looking to me that it basically justified the existence of a non canonical album.

In case you don’t know about the Citizen Nowhere project, it is going to end up being 8 albums. It started in 2003 and you can get six of the albums by CLICKING OVER TO THIS POST and the seventh at THIS POST.

That means there is one more to go and the post directly below this one (at least if you are reading this on the Listen Or Don’t section of my blog), you can hear “Loose Lips,” which will be on Citizen Nowhere 8.

But “Loose Lips” got me thinking about how I wanted 8 to sound, and I realized that the nearly-complete album I thought was #8 really wasn’t. It was a bunch of tracks that didn’t fit. Most of them were about the Recession, some were left over from previous albums, but it wasn’t fitting together and it wasn’t providing a listening experience.

So: there will be two additional “albums” of material before I close out Citizen Nowhere with the 8th album. This track, “Escape Sometime” will be on the disc called: non canonical, b-sides. There will also be a non canonical, instrumentals that will have - you guessed it - instrumentals only.

Despite the preview/”leak” track here, the B-Sides album will probably come out second.

non canonical, instrumentals will be the first release, and you will get that within the next two weeks. It’s really neat. I almost thought about making a cover that looked like it was an original motion picture soundtrack to a movie I’ll never make…

Hmmmm.

Maybe I’ll still do that.

If I find a way to escape sometime…

dontdownloadme “Escape Sometime” by Citizen Nowhere off Citizen Nowhere, non canonical, b-sides

Ok, so this one kind of sprung up on me.
If you noticed my small Facebook status update, you’ll know that work on the final Citizen Nowhere album has begun. And up until I finished the rough version of Loose Lips, there was a chance I could have dropped CN VIII on you guys right after the new year (about a year off from The Solitary Vice actually). But then I finished this track…

…and I’m starting to think the whole album should sound like this.

That decision has two ramifications:

1) All the tracks I consider part of CN VIII right now (I’m calling it something pretentious that is laughable, so let’s just use the Roman Numerals until later) aren’t any longer. They will need new vocals and arrangements or will get shunned off to the secret CN wrap-up project.

2) CN VIII is now more distant. Spring, maybe? Summer, hopefully? Fall, for sure?

Anyway. Enjoy this one and know that it will appear on the LAST Citizen Nowhere album and might be slightly more pleasantly mixed than it is now.

dontdownloadme “Loose Lips” by Citizen Nowhere off Citizen Nowhere VIII

Yeah, I have a lot of B-Sides, but I don’t want any of them to be on the new (and final) Citizen Nowhere album. So I made this, than instantly regretted making such a cool cover design for something that probably won’t happen.

I held a little Tweet Off because I felt like releasing something today for a download. Something musical.

Mostly because I’ve been thinking of a certain release a lot…hmmmm…

Anyway. Perpetual Motion Machine Gun was one of my favorite Serious Bob album names that never got used. I think Elliott came up with it. So I made this song, and I wanted to call it Perpetual Motion Machine Gun.

Pretty much the end of the story, except that this song was originally slated to appear on The Bright Side of Death, before it ended up on Out Of Insight, Out Of Mind.

To people who have no idea what I’m talking about: you don’t know it, but you’re lucky.

link “Perpetual Motion Machine Gun” by Citizen Nowhere

“Rachel Paton From The Future” was originally titled 010101 when, instead of The Solitary Vice, I was making an album of instrumentals that would all be named in binary. However, not only is it a pretty good representation of an instrumental that stays interesting, it’s also 100% Reason, which means not one sound in genuine. That also means that I’m playing, layering, arranging and making sure all the tracks come in with varied “ooomph” so they sound like it could be played live.

But it couldn’t. Unless you’re a saxophonist and you want to jam.

The title was changed for personal reasons, suffice it to say that Rachel Paton From The Future was a different creature in my mind when I was writing it. Now, Rachel Paton is in the middle of being very mad at me, so her future self actually does hole the mystery, danger and COMBAT that the song invokes. Now, when I listen to it, I picture a giant Rachel Paton trying to step on me as I flee through a city.

Download link “Rachel Paton From The Future” by Citizen Nowhere.

“Thank You Mario, But Our Princess Is In Another Castle” was originally made for CN6: Out Of Insight, Out Of Mind. It was a two part song: “Thank You Mario…” and “…But Our Princess Is In Another Castle.” Part One blew hard, so I cut it down to just Part Two and this song would be wonderful if I had a different voice.

download link “Thank You Mario, But…” by Citizen Nowhere

I don’t really know what I’m doing with my side-project music, but I do know that a new phase of songwriting is coming about, one that is driven by melody, since for a few months I’ve been trapped in situations where I’m trying to develop a melody to an already-established instrumental track.

“It’s You” started out as something I was singing to myself in the shower, cliche be damned. I happened to be showering while Adam, my roommate was out of the apartment, so I had the luxary of drying myself off and sitting down to record the vocals in Garageband within minutes, before the melody left my head.

The resulting insturmental part was also sung before it was written, which slowed my process a little as I had to shift keys while writing it.

Either way, the vocals on this mix are ROUGH and TOO QUIET, but otherwise, it’s a workable outline for a song that will eventually be fun to listen to.

It’s already stuck in my head, though this means little these days.

Check it out in its rough form, since there is a good chance the finished form will sound bigger, different and longer.

download link

I started my sonic side project, Citizen Nowhere, in 2003 when I moved from high school in Louisville, CO to New York University in…well, New York.

In Colorado, the time I had spent as Da7e for Serious Bob had gotten me interested in what I could do with ACID Pro 3.0 and multi-track recording both with direct-plugged instruments and my cheap USB mic. I devised a grand plan to release an album each semester under the name Citizen Nowhere.

Moving from Colorado to New York really through me for a loop and not only informed my solo pseudonym but the repeating themes of displacement, loss and introspective confusion.

The first semester of college saw my debut in the form of Book One: Alone In Americaland, which was an obvious title. Most of the songs had been refined in my freshman year dorm room and a series of collaborators found their way onto the release, from Ari Friedman, who would form Quintus that same year to Scarlett Corso [?] who played flute for my tiny USB mic.

Second semester saw me get more comfortable with my surroundings and friends, and lead to Book Two: Pretentious, which - with a couple exceptions - sucked. The exceptions included when I actually decided to make full songs, sometimes with the help of Nate Patterson, of Serious Bob fame.

Book III: Sin Seer followed in the fall of 2004. I did not intend to make another Citizen Nowhere album, but a soul-crushing breakup motivated me to make - gulp - a concept album. This album also saw the introduction of a naked, reclining woman on the cover of albums written mostly about…women.

Book Four: IV was a depressing album mostly motivated by my drug use in late 2004, early 2005. It plays more like a DJ set, with samples and copy written material running rampant. I’m mostly absent in a vocal sense, and while I imagine this is the least fun album to listen to, I actually very much enjoy it. I can still hear the ideas I had that motivated the experiment.

That ended the “Book” series of Citizen Nowhere. Four additional semesters of college passed and no albums came out. Things were certainly worked on, but nothing formed a unified piece.

The fifth Citizen Nowhere album, Valhalla, saw a tiny, blue, naked, reclining woman on the cover. Needless to say, my heart was ripped from my chest once more and music re-surged as the way to deal with it. That wasn’t the only reason. I had also gotten some new toys and continued work on other musical fronts. But, the masturbatory nature of Citizen Nowhere saw me cobble together old instrumental tracks from pre-2003 and entirely new tracks into a fifth effort.

Before the release of Valhalla, I took the iTunes playlist I had made of my favorite tracks off the “Books series” and released it on my blog as Mirrors & Masks, a Citizen Nowhere compilation and the last Citizen Nowhere cover to feature the name Citizen Nowhere prominently displayed. CN was created to document the transition into college and that was pretty much over.

Out Of Insight, Out Of Mind was the title of the sixth Citizen Nowhere album. It was named such because I don’t really know where that album came from. There were just leftovers from Valhalla and other projects that didn’t fit into anything else really, and they did sort of mirror my mind set at the time.

That’s six albums and one compilation since the fall of 2003.

“Probably a bad time to release the seventh album,” I thought. Both because it would be 3 albums in a year and because…how to put this delicately?….

…Out Of Insight, Out Of Mind was very approachable. A lot of the songs had pop sensibility at their base. Valhalla was about a woman and the past and resurrection, so that didn’t need to be accessible. The Solitary Vice (CN7), just isn’t accessible. I made it so I could listen to it (mostly).

Anyway, in the HUUUUUUUUGE ZIP file I’ve uploaded, I’ve included The Solitary Vice (BETA), just in case someone out there has time to download 531.8 MB and really wants a sneak peek at what this new introspective album sounds like. It will be changed.

Otherwise, if anyone but me has ever wanted all the Citizen Nowhere from the past 5 years, now is the time to get it.

I don’t think there is a place for Citizen Nowhere in the second half of 2009, or maybe ever again.

At least until the next life transition.

Click the image to beign your lengthy 531.8MB download of all 8 Citizen Nowhere albums. Should you so dare…