About this user
Ethan Gold wrote a two-page story at age four called "The Dreammaker," about a tiny miner who chiseled into people's heads at night and put visions and nightmares inside. As a self-taught composer, singer, songwriter, and performer on all the rock instruments, Ethan has been doing with music what his little miner did ever since, making cathartic, deeply affecting songs with landscapes of sound and melodies that clutch to heart, written while dreaming or in the altered state of insomnia.
Gold was born and raised in San Francisco, where a 'colorful' upbringing was punctuated by his mother's death in a helicopter crash with concert impresario Bill Graham. Ethan went on to graduate from Harvard magna cum laude in social theory, but took a hard left turn to follow his calling in music. He returned home, built a cheap basement studio, played in local bands, and began writing a rock opera. In 1999, he drove south to Los Angeles and composed the score for his brother Ari's film about the alienating aftermath of their mother's death; Helicopter went on to win awards around the world, including a student Oscar in 2000.
Settling in Lost Angeles, Ethan continued film scoring and writing songs. In 2003 he co-founded the Expatriots Collective, a series of monthly shows around Los Angeles with groups of musicians gathered on stage spontaneously playing songs that would connect, lyrically or musically, to what the artist before them had performed. At an Expatriots event in 2004, a mutual friend introduced Ethan to a songwriter named Elvis Perkins. Ethan had a clear vision of the sound for Elvis's music, and over the next year, produced and arranged Elvis's acclaimed debut album Ash Wednesday in its entirety.
Since his move to the city of angles, Ethan had been making demos for his rock opera The Rise and Fall of CAP, on an $800 recording rig wired next to a hot plate in the mini kitchen of his dilapidated one-bedroom flat. The opera began as Ethan's attempt to "break apart the male psyche", but the more Gold recorded, the more he wrote, until a single idea had become a raging 75-song opus confronting child abuse, Nazism, thrill violence, pornography, mob-whipping music, and war. He'd been having nightmares, hallucinations, headaches, and wheezing fits, while asbestos crumbled from his walls, pigeons roosted in the sills, and insect larvae crawled from his mattress. Only on lifting a heavy amplifier, revealing three layers of carpet disintegrated by toxic mold, did he recognize he was living in a metaphor.
In a new shared flat with a new perspective, Ethan "coaxed out the tender heart from inside the terrifying opera," selecting 12 demos from the 75 to carve and color into a pure form. On his trusty $800 rig, Gold sang, performed all instrumentation, engineered, and mixed his first solo album, lovingly sculpting into it the urban sonic tableau of crows, helicopters, and storms he recorded from his window. An exploration of quiet terror and yearning, ferocity and sensuous redemption, this is Ethan Gold's deluxe debut SONGS FROM A TOXIC APARTMENT.
Hometown
San Francisco
Country
United States
Play all(8)
