Last Stroll On The Hillside

The Four Immeasurable Minds is the newest release and seventh full length from Dallas, Texas based songwriter/composer David Karsten Daniels. It’s title refers to a series of four Buddhist virtues (or ‘sublime attitudes’) and the meditation practices made to cultivate them. Daniels takes each of these virtues--Love, Compassion, Joy, Equanimity--as a title for one of the album’s four tracks. An antidote to negative mental states in an increasingly busy and anxious modern world, the album presents itself as a collection of droning guitars, endlessly looping church organs, wordless vocals and wooden flutes that coalesce and detach over the album’s near 40 minutes. Guitar parts offer themselves again in mirror image, and the album can be experienced in one sitting or on repeat, as a loop. Attending to this music, the listener may have the perception that time seems to slow down, stop or move circularly (rather than linearly). Such elegiac and looping tones reflect Daniels interest in indigenous notions of circular time, while the impromptu iPhone recordings of a father/son nature walk document the Nowness of parenting (attending to a child’s ant bites and stray urine while trying to explain the meaning of the color blue).

The albums of David Karsten Daniels have always seemed to inhabit a private imaginary place where American folk, rock, jazz, ambient and field recordings bleed into each other seamlessly underneath musings on family, death, religion and love undeterred by distance and time. His music, which has been noted for its “rare and ethereal beauty”, tends to suggest a “spontaneous one-take atmosphere” yet boasts “lush production and recordings full of brilliant nuance”. NPR named his previous record, a collaboration with Matthew E. White’s Fight the Big Bull, one of the ‘5 best genre-defying albums of 2010”; DKD’s first foray into film composing, S. Cagney Gentry’s feature film Harvest, will show at film festivals later this year.

The Four Immeasurable Minds is David’s first release on his own smll thngs label. His previous 3 records were released by FatCat, a label to have also released recordings from such acts as Animal Collective, Sigur Ros, Frightened Rabbit and Bjork.

IV - Compassion

Juke Jazz/The Charm

Afraid to bleed

Songs like this seemed to pour from Jason, without end, snaking behind him like a gunpowder trail. I didn't know him well enough to know what else was behind his song, moving at the same speed. 

This song, from Jason Molina's "Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go," was the song that caught up with me. I must've bought the record right after college cuz it was already an old friend by the time I bumped into the man on the street in Bloomington Indiana. I'd just started working on music and thanked him for this song that night in front of the Buskirk Chumley Theatre on my way to a friends' house. He didn't shrink from the compliment. Instead he thanked me back and then asked what brought me to Bloomington, what I thought of it, if I was a musician myself, if I'd like to play him a song, etc. I was pretty stunned by the social grace of this guy. 

Happy birthday, Jason. Wish I could meet you again now that I'm a little older. I wish more people felt the way I do about your music and I wish you could've found your health before things caught up. 

To everybody else, Happy New Year! 2016 will be a good year. 

- DM

Buy the original here: http://secretlycanadian.com/onesheet.php?cat=SC149

Get Out Get Out Get Out (Jason Molina Cover)

Here's a version of the song "Cone of Silence" which will be on an album someday in a different form. Recorded at the Doghouse, January 2016. Written, recorded and performed by DM Stith.  

Stay warm kiddies. 



SNOW CONE

Pigeonheart will be released Friday 29th July 2016
Available digitally and on heavyweight 12" vinyl

Pre-Order on iTunes: http://geni.us/3YrO

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War Machine

I got snowed in / I cannot win / my friends / I'm trapped inside / a wall of ice / it's nice / I wear wool socks / and drink cocoa hot / warm as a lava rock / but if you're listening / feel free to start kissing me / let's get toasty / toasty, toasty, toasty / like bread from an oven / toasty, toasty, toasty / like homemade croutons / toasty, toasty, toasty / like an albino in the sun / toasty, toasty, toasty / give me your loving, loving / I got snowed in / drinking bourbon / watching Netflix / I'm trapped inside / with my sexy wife / close the blinds / I wear wool socks / practice crossword smarts / good for the heart / but if you're listening / feel free to start kissing me / let's get toasty / toasty, toasty, toasty / like bread from an oven / toasty, toasty, toasty / like homemade croutons / toasty, toasty, toasty / like an albino in the sun / toasty, toasty, toasty /

IV - Compassion

David Karsten Daniels

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