""Celebrate / And take your place where you belong / A single note within a song..."
Austin based Simitree is the genre agnostic musical project of artist, drummer, producer and "chronic music maker" Charlie Kessenich. While living in New York and collaborating with many, including members of Lucius and Dirty Projectors, the seeds of "Joy Song" came to him during a subway commute. I can see that, there is something about the static of noise that can take you to other places. At about the same time Charlie's decision to make music free of a state genre and "aimed at nourishing the transcendent spirit in favor of the political mind" was flourishing in his soul like allelopathic sunflowers.
So it is no wonder that the psychedelic movement of "Joy Song" has an almost reverent chanting tone. "Celebrate" is repeated like a mantra as Charlie fills the spaces with his poetry steeped in observations, questions "celebrating our cosmic ignorance. scorning our all too human arrogance". Amid the shifting smashed beats, droning sounds in a haze of what feels like Indian alankar tones, distorted psychedelic guitar screams offset by Charlie's calming vocal aesthetic and within the light, there are sobering moments too. The words remind us of our return the nature, the brevity of life. I have lived a long time and increasingly still don't know what it all means and I worry about our children's future.
"Joy Song" embraces you, dips you in a calm well but holds up a mirror too. Maybe as a reminder that, in the end, we can only really change the one person staring into it. At a time when "peace" serves as a well meaning catch phrase more than an endeavor, the reality of the human condition can slap you in the face like ice water. Stay strong. Peace.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
https://www.instagram.com/simitreemusic/
https://soundcloud.com/simitreemusic
https://simitree.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/simitreemusicpage
https://open.spotify.com/artist/4z6T2Y5waOt3Cyl0J14sQc?si=GUep1mDfTG29eQJ8kQ1caw&nd=1
Simitree is the result of a lifelong musical possession, an inability to focus on one instrument, a lack of focused effort on accomplishing simpler goals, a dreamer’s web of what no one would ever call a map to success, and an abject denial of the existence of concrete genres, (among other things). Born to Midwestern parents in a hyperbolically east coast suburb called Watertown, Charlie Kessenich grew up building massive improvised Lego constructions while glued to a radio. He was fascinated and terrified by Prince songs and equally intrigued when his mother played Ravel on the piano. Discovering weed, jazz and Radiohead in early adolescence and deciding on the drums as a principal instrument, Kessenich’s self perpetuating fractal snowball of musical obsession began rolling down hill. Soon the personal computer became the canvas on which he could happily paint the different colors of the different instruments he bounced between, and with which he could furthermore mangle and blur their hues. Narrowly avoiding abduction into a band that turned out to be a failed cult, Kessenich moved on to begin a decade of sonic exploration, in his bedroom alone, as well as collaborating with the bands ‘ensemble, et al.’ and ‘Toebow.’ The outcome of that exploration is Simitree: atmospheric, oblique, immersive, hi-fi/lo-fi, modern psychedelic, soultronic, and whatever other tag du-jour one wishes to apply to it.
Simitree, Lo-fi Rock, Dream Pop, Alternative Rock, psych pop, psychedelic rock, soultronic, singer songwriter, New York, Austin, "Joy Song", agnostic music, transcendent spirit, Charlie Kessenich,
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