VENTER

VENTER is Connecticut-based non-genre-specific Writer/Musician/Composer (and Literature Graduate-student) Christopher J.M. Venter. Though it had not been released until 2007, Venter's first album, Synthetic America, was largely completed during 2004. The album features no human words and, with the exception of the faux 80s' Cartoon Theme track "Super Jay Gatsby (Robot of Doom)" consists entirely of computer-sequenced notes.

Synthetic America was followed in 2005 by the much darker and more abstract album, Sirius B. Aside from the album's mood, Sirius B departs from Synthetic America in that it is heavily based on classical horror music (rather than 1980s themes and game music) and includes several lengthy live-recorded noise-guitar solo tracks. The album also focuses heavily on "other worldly" production, intended to make the album sound as if it has been transmitted to earth from an unknown civilization. Venter claims that he abandoned the album for nearly two years because he found the darkness and concept of his creation highly disturbing and attempts to listen to early mixes while driving resulted in high anxiety and panic attacks. In 2007, he decided to face his fear of Sirius B and "finished" the project (originally intended to be a more double album [now whittled down to 79 minutes]). He is in the process of releasing the finished product. Venter says that most originally intended tracks are present on the new version but many are abruptly truncated. Initially, many songs were intended to be more than twice as long but after returning to the project and hearing the choppy, jarring, collage-like nature of the unfinished songs, Venter liked the overall effect and felt that, with his new production, it perfectly conveyed the mental instability that the album intends to capture and even impose on the listener.

2007's second release (and third-recorded album in the Venter Chronology) was Realize. Realize takes a nearly opposite approach to music than Synthetic America. The singer-songwriter style album was recorded within the space of one hour on one track of a 4-track tape recorder in Venter's apartment bedroom. Necessarily, the album was recorded live in one take (aside from the last track, which is a second take due to an egregious error in the first version). Originally, the idea for the album was to record in the midst of normal apartment noise and "whatever happened", but school workloads and new song additions pushed the project back repeatedly until the quieter summer months. The main concept of the album was to capture the songs in the room in which they were written on the instrument they were written on with as little production as possible (with the exception of two tracks which were mostly written while Venter was in High School and only finished lyrically in the Wu 204 bedroom).

Notably, all of Venter's projects are concept albums. He feels that all good albums are, in some way, concept oriented. He says "albums" not written with a specific concept in mind are more like song-collections and feel disjointed and much less interesting to him as a listener. However, Venter's definition of a concept album is somewhat more loose than the traditional. For him, the concept does not necessarily translate into plot or character, but is more a pervasive idea or, more importantly, aesthetic.

He is currently working on several new projects; a follow up to Synthetic America entitled "Robot Album 2," an album of Murder Ballads and crime songs as heard by a newcomer bar patron who realizes he has walked in on a "Jailbirds' Open Mic Night" tentatively called "A Room Full of Murderers,"(on the back burner) and, most pressingly, a collaborate project with fellow writer and musician D. Michael Jones called "Space Age: The Wheels of Progress" which is a shoegaze/folk/classic rock/indie rock mixture that centers around the daily problems of science fictional beings.