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

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

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…

Here’s the skinny: There are two versions of this album available. The MP3 version, featuring the cartoon me looking over a mob of people as a giant blue hand crushes smokestacks marked with The Gentleman and the moody, green digital smoke-themed AIFF version.

MP3 - smaller ZIP file, ripped CD quality.
AIFF - bigger ZIP file, awesome quality, moodier cover

Got it?

I knew I said I’d get this out by October, and I’m obviously several days late. But, my sixth album of wacky demos went through some changes in the few weeks I spent “mastering” them. Songs were added cut, designs were changed, the end of October loomed.

Oh, and I produced some stuff in there.

The good thing is that, for awhile, Brillhart/Gonzales is going to eat some time so I won’t feel compelled to work on that 45 minute binary-based instrumental album.

Click the images to Download.

In the spirit of new content, this is a big day. The reality is that in these tough economic time, starting a business has put a strain on my finances. I need to monetize my hobbies, or cut out the ones that aren’t worth additional time or monetary investment.

But until then, it’s been nice sharing with most of you.

Elliott shot me a few text messages yesterday about Valhalla, which he seemed to enjoy, though there are volume issues from track to track. I was aware that it might be an issue, but neglected to do anything about it. Just know these things: everything is set to boost its volume by 100% when you load it into iTunes. The insturmental tracks DO NOT need to be increased, but most things with vocals do. It boils down to the difference between Reason’s mastering and GarageBand’s normalizing.

It seems both needlessly authentic and horribly stupid to use GarageBand for vocals, but my laptop can’t run all the programs I use and still take ProTools (Celtex, Adobe Creative Suite, Final Draft, iLife, Swich, Various converters and encoders, CyberDuck, etc.)

None of this matters, except that Valhalla’s release date just happened because Jess and I have been fucking around with recording. I was smoking a cigarette with Jess out back of the Lashly house and said: “I think I’ll release Valhalla today.” Jess laughed, then we came back in and listened to some of the shit we’ve been recording.

Download the full album in MP3 quality by clicking the above image.

Download the full vector piece by CLICKING HERE.

Download the full cover HERE.

Mirrors & Masks covers the first four Citizen Nowhere albums whose purpose was to give me a musical outlet during college that was different than this blog, which strangely has the same years of operation of Citizen Nowhere.

The tracks are in no particular order, though this is the order that I have been listening to them in, followed with a short description of each one and why it was included in the overall mix.

Tracks were EXCLUDED because they sucked, were 7 minutes long or ended up being foolish in one way or another.
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