this was an outcropping of working on the poop squad project with garrett. he did the beat boxing, i did the editing.

the plan was to do a soundtrack for garrett's t-shirt designs. weird concept, i know. these were preliminary tracks. project never came to fruition, but these tracks are almost fully mastered.

we don't have a name. we play teh rock s0ngz.

these are all the tracks that i've recorded (post dj demonboy), without any collaboration. most are computer based. i can't really put them in a genre other than 'electronic'. most feature programmed drums / noise, guitar, bass and keyboard (or programmed synth parts). some of the later songs in the list were recorded as gifts to my wife amanda.

these two tracks were recorded by zac and myself during our college years. the first - 'no disco' was recorded during our freshman year, over a break when we were both in siler city. the drums were fruity loops, i sang, zac and i played guitar and bass. the second track - 'knock on wood' - was recorded during our junior year. the drums are again fruity loops, zac provided the guitar & backing vocals, i played bass (i think) and sang, and clayton played keyboard and sang backup.

'no disco' is a depeche mode cover. 'knock on wood' was written by steve cropper & eddie floyd, and our version was based off otis redding's recording.

'a dark summer' is actually the third name. first we called ourselves 'cacophony'. next we were 'SiLT', and then we settled on 'a dark summer'.

cacophony:
this was the first band i ever belonged to. five members; started in the summer of 1995. zac and i were in middle school. wes was in 11th grade. only a few songs were written during this incarnation of the band. most of the songs were written in the style of brad stepp, one of two guitarists in the band. zac was the other guitarist, i played bass, wes played keys and sang, and daniel tilley also sang. no drummer. here's the tape that contains the first cacophony tracks ever recorded.

SiLT:
by the time we changed the name, daniel was no longer in the band (to our relief), and we had added a drum machine. most of the music writing was starting to fall on the shoulders of zac and i, and we started to take on a down-tempo, more melodic feel.

a dark summer:
i'm pretty sure we changed the name to 'a dark summer' almost immediately after settling on 'SiLT'. the name was wes's idea. it was a little darker, which we all liked, and seemed a little more mature, so i was cool with it. at some point, brad left town. then towards the end of our senior year of high school, zac and wes had a falling out. wes and i continued to record for a couple years in mindset of 'a dark summer'.

all in all, we wrote and recorded some pretty good tracks. i don't think i could ever collaborate with anyone as well as i can with wes and zac. the band lasted, in one form or another, for at least five years, most of them filled with sporadic bursts of creativity (usually during wes's breaks from college while zac and i were still in high school). wes and i continued to record during my college years; zac and i also did some sporadic recording.

these are all tracks recorded during high school, on my tascam four track. demonboy was a nickname i picked up in middle school that kinda stuck, so i used it and threw the arbitrary "dj" in front of it. everything was done with my squier super-sonic, thunderbird bass, alesis sr-16, zoom 510, boss odb-3, my dad's mandolin, and the church organ. some of these started out as demos for 'a dark summer', but they grew into their own songs and i just kinda kept them that way.

these were 'jam sessions' (for lack of a better word) with zac, noah (one time high school friend) and myself. usually noah was singing, and zac and myself were switching between guitar, bass, drum and keyboard. recorded during high school, after wes & zac and had parted ways. the music was juvenile, the lyrics were downright crude. don't hold your breath waiting to hear this stuff. cuz i'm taking it to my grave.

i bought my own computer during christmas break of my senior year of high school, and wes hooked me up with my first audio editing software - cool edit '96. i don't know who had the idea first, or what prompted us to do it, but one day while zac was over at my house, we started ripping cd's and splicing the audio together to make new songs. these weren't the typical 'mashups' that have come along in the last few years, but completely 'new' songs - with a piano part from one cd, a drum loop from another, a guitar part from another, a vocal snippet from another, and on and on. we started out keeping a list of all the different people that we were ripping off, but then it just got tedious so we stopped. listening back, i can't even identify where some of the samples came from. most tracks include between 10 to 20 sampled parts. some with many more, some with less. by high school graduation, we had at least 10 tracks completed. we kept doing them over the next few years, with the last one completed by yours truly in may of 2002.