The Hippodrome

Streak Download

Dan Smart lives up to his name—intelligent literary, poetic, and artistic references are abundant in his solo work. As a member of Probably Vampires, Smart adds keyboard textures to songs inspired by “real, true, unwavering 60′’s pop sound,” but as a solo artist he thankfully allows himself the chance to indulge in heavier themes in music that includes “overlapping elements of country, folk, rock and roll, electronic, and experimental art music, sometimes all rolled into a single song.”

Freed from the constraints of live performance that define the parameters of Probably Vampires, Smart says his solo work is conceived as “‘recorded music’ … dictated more by what I feel that the songs ‘want’ or ‘need’ more than on what they ‘have’ to have.” He enjoys taking risks and experimenting, just out of curiosity to see what will transpire without having to worry about “hooks or dance-ability or something like that.”

Smart tells me that the the The Hippodrome’s feature song, “Streak,” was “actually composed for a modern dance project by the same name for a University of Illinois student. It was loosely based (both the dance and the music) on John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl novels, but it is also a song about making the biggest, longest, loudest, and most colorfully noisy streak on this planet in the time that you have, because that’s all you can do.”

Indeed, the song lives up to the artist’s description. It begins with hushed vocals that quickly billow into an ecstatic choir, all while smeared (you could even say “streaked”) by fantastically long delay tails. This spacious introduction sets up the entrance of a country-sounding acoustic guitar right out of left field; this is quickly joined by sequenced drumbeats that support the wordless and ever-lifting vocal motif. The precision and professionalism evident in this recording might incline listeners to envision Smart working in some grand, complicated recording studio somewhere, but this is not the case. Smart home-records all parts for his solo material himself, and says he “did not use Pro Tools or any computer programs to record this music, apart from an MPC 1000 to sequence some of the samples.”

At Smart’s own MySpace page, you’ll find “Greyed Rainbow,” a song based on Smart’s poem inspired by a Jackson Pollock painting of the same name. You’ll find samples from “weird, religious cassette tapes that [he] found in truck stops and at thrift stores.” In his lyrics, you’ll find themes of religion in relation to death, communication, and relationships, even though Smart says “I don’t consider myself to be religious in a strict way whatsoever.” If you’re well-read enough, you might even be able to draw parallels between Smart’s music and his professed inspirations: “a lot of modernist and post-modern writers/thinkers like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Eliot, and even Woolf.”

With sharp songwriting and copious academic references, Dan Smart proves there is intelligent life on the internet. Check it out for yourselves.

This entry was posted by David Sternesky on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Blurbs, Written By David Sternesky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.