a little bit about my music

music has been a part of my life for as long as i can remember. i grew up listening to a lot of beatles and elvis thanks to mom and dad. i come from a very musical family and i have a lot of fond memories making music with my father and brother in church as a kid. we started putting together bands in high school and we had a lot of fun playing out at festivals and parties. my brother and i were in a dixieland band (i played clarinet, he played sax) for about seven years called the harlingen hot licks all star dixieland band and i was a founding member of the now legendary south texas indie rock band suicide tuesday.

the advent of soft studios for home computers has really revolutionized music for me and a lot of the musical projects i'm currently involved in utilize this interesting new development in home music production.

you can listen my latest tracks for free here on my website if you click on the launch player button to the left (or click the text link you just read). if you like anything you hear, you can now purchase tracks right here on this nifty little flash player...

summermilk

one of my current projects, summermilk was originally an acoustic/indierock outfit which allowed me to perform very stripped down original sets of acoustic music with guitar and harmonica. it started out as a duet with a cello player from austin back in 2001-2002, then evolved into a duet with my friend ruth on violin from 2002-2005. later i refitted the band with virtual instruments.

find out more at the SUMMERMILK MYSPACE PAGE.

i just finished a new album called MAY YOU ALWAYS LIVE FREE (which is available digitally through that SNOCAP store above for $10) and am currently releasing singles every couple weeks or so. most of these usually get featured on the myspace page or in my blog.

estrechez

ESTRECHEZ was the name for a solo electronica project i began after the collapse of a band i was involved with back in 2004 called united altered states. "estrechez" means:

(Spanish)
es-tre-chez
1. - narrowness, conscientious attention to rules and details
2. (aprieto) - bind, jam, tight
3. (amistad) - closeness, intimacy
4. (pobreza) - poverty, need, trouble with money, a state occasioned by scarcity of money and a shortage of credit
5. (austeridad) - austerity

between 2004 and 2005 i produced several cd's worth of instrumental electronica (some of it good, some of it not so good). here's those cd's...

currently i'm working on new ESTRECHEZ tracks when i'm not working on SUMMERMILK music. the project has taken a much more new wave/post punk/emotronic direction featuring vocals and a more futuristic/electronic/synthetic sound in a very pop oriented vein. sort of like an electronic 80's version of summermilk, actually. i'm releasing each song individually through my SNOCAP and you can check out my latest at the ESTRECHEZ MYSPACE PAGE. of course, current tracks are also available for a free listen on this website's music player.

recent past musical endeavors...

SANCHO SWIFT AND SQUAREPEGZ

SQUAREPEGZ was: MC Sancho Swift - vocals/beats/guitars Big Mouth Bass - vocals MC Sam Sinn - vocals guest vocals provided by Zen Boodamasta, Unknown Souljah, Dope Jedi and Punk Rock Mouse

When I first started working on this strip, I had a few goals in mind. I'd just gotten through yet another webcomics drama which had brought me out of a hiatus and I was looking for something to work on that would challenge me artistically as well as technically. I had been working on music using computer software and decided to experiment intigrating music into webcomics. The other big reason I started working on THOSE WERE THE SALAD DAYZ was that my wife and I were expecting our baby daughter and we were thinking about moving to Vermont once she was born. This strip enabled me to get together with all my friends and spend a lot of quality time with them as I involved them in helping me create the strip and the music for it before our big move. I cherish the year we spent playing music together and performing some of these songs in live settings. Many of my friends were inspirations for the characters in the strip and the three main MC's from the fictional band SQUAREPEGZ were voiced by their human counterparts in my real life hip hop band SQUAREROOTZ. Upon arriving in Vermont after our long trek across the country from south Texas I had come to terms with the fact that I'd accomplished the two goals I'd set for myself with this strip: spending time with all my good friends and involving them in my work before leaving the Rio Grande Valley (Dirty Dirty South) and continuing to push those experimental webcomics boundries. The strip had even gotten a couple writeups. So, yet another "noble failure" to add to my growing collection, only in my heart I know I got everything I wanted out of this even if I didn't finish the story. By the time we'd left south Texas I had completed most of the instrumentals and songs for the comic. I also had a basic outline for 200 episodes that would tell the tale of the bands' journey to the "BEATOFF" which included getting busted for selling pot brownies, acquiring a zombie busdriver named ZEN BOODAMASTAH, inadvertently opening a gateway to hell that would unleash a demon attack that would wreck the competition and finally losing a character in a glorious grand finale.

A few months before we left I started making CD's of all the official songs for the strip under the pretense of selling them. I got exactly two orders. I wound up giving a lot of them (probably most of them) to friends and family. Which was ok with me because, like I said before, I was mostly doing all this for them anyway. I've been noticing over the past few months that the strip is still getting a steady stream of visitors every day and I started to think I should post all the songs and an explanation as to why there haven't been any more comics in so long. so without further ado, here's all the songs we made for this strip. Enjoy! THOSE WERE THE SALAD DAYZ by Squarepegz featured in the strip the practice literary dub sam sinn was his name fired from the band chillin' on the couch itchy crabs theme instrumental 16 never made it up big mouth bass with itchy crabs bright idea i couldn't get to sleep last night maybe it's the weed dancehall daze funk crown rhythm i'm coming back from the dead (booda's theme) gingerbread man happy lovey instrumental cigarello kiss my sassafras punkrockmouse's theme sancho swing timetickingclock saybaybeh snibblets of rhymes suffocation kiss worldwide beatdown booda wins the beatdown all's well that ends well extras cigarello (cooler than cool remix) THOSE WERE THE SALAD DAYZ audio ad As for the strip, no I'm not really abandoning the characters just yet, but it might be a while before I get back to doing anything with them. The chance for any new SQUAREPEGZ musical material is pretty slim being so many miles away from my collaborators. More than anything, the characters will live on in a life quite similar to all their other cartoon band counterparts through music and random images.