UPCOMING FULL-LENGTH by Chris Peck the Town Crier: Groundhog’s Day

I don’t know when it’ll be done, ‘cuz I need dough, but this record will be a mutha.

It’s the first one released as the “Town Crier”, which I’ve now tattooed inside my lip and beneath my locks of shiny hair. We’re recording it at Hyde Street Studios, which will sadly be wrecking balled in 2008, taking with it 40 years of Bay Area music history. The head engineer is Scott McDowell, whose obsessive power rivals that of Cooper from Twin Peaks.

The lead-off single, “Underwear”, features the entirety of Medusa Pound, an R&B collaborative songwriter’s juggernaut. (That’s Greg Scott II, Amber Rose, Angeline Saris, me, and John Rogers on this track, though the newer line-up of M.P. has changed.)

Every track on the album features my rhyming, and live band arrangements. Alternates between the 1950’s and the 2050’s… Feel the vibrations, y’all!

The Crymuscles : newiebuttagoodie (ep, 2006)

Who is our Louis Armstrong of today? Who our Mozart? People say, “Oldie but a goodie” but that never made no sense to me. To the contrary, “new BUT good” was the mission statement for this EP. The “Coffee” recording first appeared here, if you don’t count the countless times we sung it on Thursdays from 10pm-12am at the Bart Station Plaza at 16th and Mission. (C.A.I., wut, wut! Miss you, tricks. I’ll be back.) I borrowed heavily from the honorable history of Black American music for this one. We fused song music with beat music. We used hand-played instruments, but kept the mindset of a sampler. The musicians were: Boogie Weeber (rock-solid hook singer), John Rogers, John Logan, John Kennedy, Matt Montgomery, Greg Scott II, Eric Bertoni, Eric Gallagher, Miles Kennedy, and Dave Napolitan. It was recorded by Noah Waldman, Andy Scott, Miles Kennedy, and tragically, me.

The Garden Sings (LP, 2005)

Commenced upon returning to California in 2003. Kindred to the earlier “You’re Tape Machine’s Not Broken”, ‘cause it’s made of home recordings, mostly. There’s songs in the land out here in Cali. It is an end unto itself to be on this land. The album contains songs, earth mystic music (inspired by Terry Riley, maaan), beats triggered through my mallet kat, my first rhymes ( one about my grandpa, Richard Peck, and one about a toy store robber named Jeffrey Manchester.) and some tribal/bartok sounding shiznit.) Some brothers from my crew in the Bay Area are on this record, too, namely Luke Westbrook, Dillon Westbrook, David Whitten, Boogie Weeber, Greg Scott II, and John Kennedy. Hard copies of this one can be bought for $10, with beautiful cover art by Ian Mullen, Amy Cuneo, Valerie Kellogg, and Annika of Austin.

The Death of Captain Myrage (EP film score, 2002)

This is the score to Nafatli Beane Rutter’s film of the same name. It was his senior thesis at UCLA. The “flick”, as Naf calls all movies, includes flocks of children fist fighting on the basketball court, nervously attending their first dance, and one boy’s imaginary friend, Captain Myrage. The music is instrumental, and includes electric guitar dream sequences, pastoral acoustic vibes, and some hand drum arrangements. The score is about nine minutes long. It was the most cohesive stuff I’d pulled off up to that point, thanks to Naf’s prodding and joyfulness.

Hide & Seek (EP, 2001)

This is a five song collaboration with my homegirl Amy Cooper. We made this recording in our homes in NYC and played a couple shows back in the summer of 2001. The music is mostly acoustic and intimate and soothing. Amy has since gone on to playin’ some alternately gritty and pretty music, (it’s always very real.) She lives in LA now. The two tunes here are the ones I wrote for the disc, there’s a bossa (Birds Up There) and a heartbreak song (For You & Everyone Else). John Logan and David Whitten are the rhythm section on “Birds”.

Song music, instrumental nature joy fusion, trio be-bop. This compiles all the extraneous tracks I made between ‘97 & ’00. Some were recorded at 6/8 Studios, on the corner of Houston and Broadway in NYC, by an erudite black man named Perkins.(“I Own Me”, “Make Things Alright”). It chronicles my adjustment to living in NYC, studying jazz guitar with some kind and also some unkind cats, and learning to wear skinnier pants than I had in California.

A four-track reel-to-reel bedroom concoction, made after returning from a couple weeks of drumming in Havana. This was my 17th summer on Earth, at Raintree Ranch, (a.k.a my parent’s house in Novato.) Messy distorted funk, afro-grooves, Zawinul tributes, rapping over a mutation of Steve Miller’s The Joker, (“Chillon wit Dillon/Gardenhose”), and tape machine experiments. I’d also just discovered the Talking Heads’ “Remain In Light” right before starting this, and had been blessed/cursed by a dancer channeling Elegua, the Santaria diety of life and death, at a voodoo ceremony in the Callejon de Jamel. The album contained a couple attempts to win a girl named Julie Vu. It kinda worked, for a minute. (“11:11”) Have you ever been to the ranch? Do I know you? The album cover is stolen from Roy DeForest’s “Country Dog Gentleman”.