Musical Bio and other albums

Dicki and Chris departed Perfect Beings on their own good terms.  In late 2016, Johannes, Jesse and I regrouped and set out to make another album.  We envisioned it as some kind of geometric soundscape, through four 18 minute prog suites.  This was enough time for one full side of a vinyl record.  Thus, a double vinyl release. Drummer Ben Levin brought a very loose and explosive approach that allows the album to breathe.  Lyrically it’s just a barrage of first, second, and third person stories about the psycho-somatic stress of people living in the modern world.  One of the best aspects was working with many musicians.  This is the first album that I’ve composed such elaborate woodwind and orchestral elements. Creating a section with the Ehru and the Koto was a fun experience.  This album has a lot of musical offerings to which my voice is only one part of.  It’s called VIER (2018) which means ‘four’ in Dutch and German.  I see it as four mini albums that fit together like a pyramid.  Enter the center.  Enter:

Perfect Beings. VIER 

I started writing songs in about 8th grade, joined my first band as a freshman, and when I became a senior in high school I was lucky enough to get a 4 track tape recorder.  This was a few years before Garageband and it’s interesting to think that my generation was the last of the analog era.  I was fascinated with this machine.  The ability of multi-layering different sounds, creating musical landscapes and learning how to sing harmony with myself, it was a great musical learning tool.  From the demos I made on my own, I received a call from Kevin Clay, a legendary musician in the local St. Louis scene who had moved to Nashville.  He saw potential in my recordings and invited me to come to Nashville and record an album in a professional recording studio.  My life changed after this experience.  We recorded in the summer of 2004 over the span of two weeks.  I was 22 years old, I had one more year of college.  I came back to Mizzou that fall with this album and started playing a lot of shows.  It seemed that I had found my calling to take music seriously, and so I finished school, packed up my guitar and albums, and moved to Nashville, TN to pursue the craft of songwriting and music.  Here is that album, Nary a Day.

Nary a Day

 

St. Louis will always be my home, and it’s where I cut my teeth early on playing in the blues bars of Soulard.  I love folk music and I’ve always admired musicians that could not only front great bands, but also put on intimate and entertaining performances by themselves.  I chose to release this live album because it’s a big part of who I am and where I came from.

Live From Off Broadway 2007

 

After this performance I retreated for a few years to write the album and the book, Rene Breton, Asleep in Green.  I was attempting to stretch my musical capabilities and set myself apart from the country folk revival that was happening in East Nashville at the time.  I was working at the Nashville Library, reading a lot about art and surrealism, learning about world music, jazz and progressive rock.  Of course, funding for the project took a long time and I was a poor artist.  I found a way however, building two recording studios in trade for studio time, mostly at night when the studios weren’t booked by the larger country music clients. Looking back, I had some amazing mentors and band mates at the time, most notably Tobin Sio, Mike Latterell, and Nicole Taher. This album, released in 2009, then re-released with a book in 2011, was a hands on learning experience for me, and it was a bit of a maniacal pursuit.  It led to tours, radio interviews, lots of cool parties, and eventually Los Angeles. Here is an EPK from that time.

Rene Breton.  Asleep in Green

 

Asleep in Green opened a lot of doors for me.  In the beginning of 2011, it was in heavy rotation on KCRW in Los Angeles, we had a working operation in Nashville as an indie label (5th ace records), a van, trailer, a house we all lived in.  Unfortunately the music industry tanked.  In spite of notoriety, we couldn’t make it work financially and it drove the band to break up.  I hadn’t the inclination to quit music though.  My fiance and I packed up our things and moved to L.A. in July of 2011, then immediately broke up. I joined Facebook to stay in touch with people and spent a lot of time traveling around the country recording with my little white Macbook.  All the songs on this album were of that time.  These were the songs that were never meant to make an album, but I’ve chosen to release it in it’s rawness because there are some good songs on here, it’s whimsical, most of it is on drugs, it captures a certain period of when I was pretty lost and exploring, which I’m not ashamed of. I originally titled it The Great Midwestern American Facebook Dream, just a silly working title, so it stuck.

The Great Midwestern American Facebook Dream

 

I was living in a sailboat in Redondo beach the autumn of 2011, and I didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles.  It was a time of immense freedom and also uncertainty.  I met Colin Mann, Jackie Monzon and Spencer Trinwith and re-formed Rene Breton.  The album is a mix of live band and electronic stylings by Colin Mann, truly a wonderful musician. We recorded this record very quickly over the course of the next 6 months and we were playing shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco.  This album marked the end of an era in a way, because after this album was released I met Johannes Luley and we formed Perfect Beings.  I’m grateful to Colin and the friend he was for me at that time.  Here is that album.

Rene Breton. Between City and Country

 

In September of 2011, I met Johannes Luley at his studio in Venice.  I was commissioned to write a Christmas song for a movie.  We immediately were friends.  He called me a few weeks later and asked if I’d like to join him on a new idea for a project; a serious progressive rock band.  I suggested that we do an opera I’d been thinking of writing based on my good friend Suhail’s book, TJ and Tosc.  It’s a science fiction story based on futurist predictions and possibilities. I’ve always loved becoming characters in songs and I love rock theater as an art form.  When Dicki Flizsar, Jesse Nason and Chris Tristram joined the band I could clearly see what I could attempt as a rock front man.  Furthermore, as a musician, my intent and practice was becoming more spiritual, almost like a martial art.  I thought that if I was going to continue being an artist, I should surround myself with people that knew more than me, and I should attempt to say something about humanity.  I understood right away working with Johannes was a way. There’s always been a bit of vulnerability in my writing and to juxtapose this with multi-dimensional, multi-colored progressive rock just felt like a really nice combination.  I think that what we made with Perfect Beings (2014), the first album is pretty spectacular.  There’s nothing I would change about it.  Here is a short film and a link to that album.

The making of Perfect Beings

Perfect Beings

After the release of the first Perfect Beings I was back on track with a new vision ahead living in LA.  I placed my songwriting duties in creating for this band, and all other musical avenues were based in education.  I joined a Bulgarian men’s choir to focus on singing and also to go to neat cultural events and such.  It also taught me different harmonies and musical traditions of a time long ago.  Harmony became a real focus for me.  I knew there was something special about music without words.  There were plenty of people doing trance electronic music at the time, so I didn’t want to go that route, and I didn’t want to necessarily chase some kind of popularity for the sake of it.  Then one evening in 2013, I was sitting at the piano and I just began testing two notes against each other for as long as the notes would hold out.  Then I would listen to the silence in between the notes before I’d hit another two notes.  The simple combinations were astounding to me.  It was so enjoyable! Different combinations had different feelings about them, and there was no time other than the pulsing note tones.  I could hear my own body if I truly focused on it, it was if I was vibrating inside the music.  I thought, “this is meditation music”.  So I set out to create two albums.  One would be a kind of meditative retreat, Moon Dreams (2017).  The other would be a meditative astral journey, Songs for Meditation and Mental Travel (2014).

Moon Dreams

Songs for Meditation and Mental Travel 

Of course, projects bleed into other projects and while I was spending all this time doing yoga and meditating I was writing my journals and poems.  I also had a short stint in a local theater group called FEAL that produced some wonderful art. This led into the songs that would make it on Perfect Beings II.  Johannes wasted no time in starting a new album, in 2015 we had a solid group of guys and a clear structure on how to tackle it.  The whole band is just on fire on this album.  Dicki and Chris holding down the foundation of the bass and drums, the album is avant garde, it’s deeply spiritual and heavy.  Here is Perfect Beings II (2016).

Perfect Beings II

 

Dicki and Chris departed Perfect Beings on their own good terms.  In late 2016, Johannes, Jesse and I regrouped and set out to make another album.  We envisioned it as some kind of geometric soundscape, through four 18 minute prog suites.  This was enough time for one full side of a vinyl record.  Thus, a double vinyl release. Drummer Ben Levin brought a very loose and explosive approach that allows the album to breathe.  Lyrically it’s just a barrage of first, second, and third person stories about the psycho-somatic stress of people living in the modern world.  One of the best aspects was working with many musicians.  This is the first album that I’ve composed such elaborate woodwind and orchestral elements. Creating a section with the Ehru and the Koto was a fun experience.  This album has a lot of musical offerings to which my voice is only one part of.  It’s called VIER (2018) which means ‘four’ in Dutch and German.  I see it as four mini albums that fit together like a pyramid.  Enter the center.  Enter:

Perfect Beings. VIER 

 

I want to say thank you for listening to my offerings, and I hope this musical history can give some more perspective on the music I’ve created, both on my own and with other people.  If anything, it shows change.  You have to change, because we are all so limited, and when you think about limitations on yourself, you confront them and push forward.  So it’s always growth and it’s always change.  I guess we’ll see where we go from here.  Please get in touch with me if you’d like to.  Best, Ryan