|
For the duration of his school years, he produced
a diverse body of work on a Tascam Porta One 4-Track Cassette Recorder, including forays into pop, noise, country, plunderphonics, soundtrack, american primitive, sk-5 synth instrumental, epic poetry, MIDI, avant guitar, and other less identifiable genres. This era culminated with the thunderous Dipped For Joy. Recorded in the summer of 1991, right after he graduated from college, it was a bid for escape and salvation - a definitive
statement of Sweets' wild dreams and churning fears as he stood on the precipice of adulthood. Crossing the threshold into the work world, Sweets slowed down his prolific output considerably,
while deepening his focus and commitment to his music. In an effort to drastically improve his sound quality and bring a new vision to fruition, he labored for ten years toward the creation of Something's Been Lost - which was completed in 2002. After this break, he turned his focus to unlocking
electric rhythm guitar's potential to deeply express what remained locked in his soul. From 2003-2007 he worked toward
the creation of the Engines of Joy Series of albums. After years of starts and stops, in late 2006 the music began flowing from deep within. Four years later, in 2011, at an open mic in Brooklyn
that Sweets was performing regularly at, Seth of Orange Milk Records approached him, and ultimately offered to release his first official album. Inspired by the unfettered creativity
of the cassette scene, Sweets began wildly experimenting again - for the first time since his 4-track days 20 years prior. His explorations
during this era include a sci-fi musical exploration of his psyche, a spoken word story album that re-tells the aforementioned sci-fi album in words, an alien radio broadcast, a buggy exploration of polyrhythms with a Casio SK-5 sampler, a celebration of rhythm guitar, a setting of a chapter of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to music, a spoken word album about the NYC area, a collage of home-recorded Edison cylinders (an older, weirder America), the transformation of the electric guitar into an unrecognizable bounce house of sound, journeys in a land beyond Switched on Bach, interactive multimedia, a cassette alternative to the Voyager Golden Record, live performance, a bunch of albums with his friends, and a number of more traditional rock-style albums including Infinite Potential, Doin' The Human Thing, Whatever Dreamy Void, A Holiday... or Hiding Out, The Bar Band Is Here, catastrophes, How To Play An Electric Fence, and Joy Point Now, Joy Point Forever. Underlying all of Sweets' output is an unrelenting
commitment to exploring and expressing his interior worlds without trepidation and with as much accuracy as possible.
|