An album that caught my attention recently is Minus Green, a solo project by Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci. With the ability to sing and play the trumpet, flugelhorn, guitar, bass, upright bass, banjo, keys, drums, harmonica, mandolin, glockenspiel, and theramin, Mr. Cicci is a musician most suited to DIY music production, and Minus Green’s lyrical, textured tracks confirm once again that the regime change from expensive studio to home studio production is dynamic and evolving.

The album website states that Mr. Cicci wrote and recorded the entire album from “midnight to 6 AM – obsessively recording and re-recording every instrument on the album alone in his small Brooklyn apartment, using borrowed mics and equipment found on Manhattan sidewalks.” Minus Green, a photographic filter used to remove the “sickening green glow caused by fluorescent lighting,” is a personal ode to Mr. Cicci’s own “attempts to filter out nightmares, drug abuse and illness.” The album features wordy, sometimes incomprehensible, vocals, but always lays consistently a bedrock of compelling sounds (some are more familiar than others) that entice the listener, and occasionally borders on mayhem. Melodies are more sweeping and mysterious than catchy, and the influence of rock’s return to creative songwriting with unusual progressions and chord voicings is unmistakable. One cannot not hear a little Thom Yorke, Morrissey, and even Jim Morrison in this work.

Left: Mr. Cicci’s Home Studio; Center: Homemade Theramin; Right: (Left) An Alesis Nanoverb turned into a reverb pedal; (3rd pedal from left) A homemade analog delay pedal; (Right) An extensively modified Boss EQ pedal

To get a better idea of this one-man operation, I visited Mr. Cicci at his home studio in Ft. Greene. (more…)