| Jon DeRosa | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Jon DeRosa |
| Born | December 21, 1978 |
| Origin | Lodi, New Jersey |
| Genres | Post-rock Post-punk Ambient Americana |
| Occupations | Singer-songwriter |
| Instruments | Vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar |
| Years active | 1996–present |
| Labels | Brighter Records Projekt Records Darla Records Silber Records |
| Associated acts | Aarktica Dead Leaves Rising Pale Horse and Rider |
| Website | Official site |
Jon DeRosa (born December 21, 1978, in Lodi, New Jersey) is a guitarist, composer, singer-songwriter, and vocalist. He has been involved with several critically acclaimed acts, including Dead Leaves Rising (DLR), Pale Horse and Rider (PHaR), as well as the musical collective known as Aarktica.
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Raised in the small shore town of Manasquan, NJ, DeRosa grew up idolizing Glenn Danzig. In his early teens, while studying classical and flamenco guitar and memorizing the entire output of 4AD and Projekt Records, he began writing and recording music. Although DeRosa had been involved with several musical projects by the time he turned eighteen, his dark folk/goth band Dead Leaves Rising was the first of his endeavors to draw national attention and continued to garner acclaim until it was disbanded in 2002.
In 1998, DeRosa lost nearly all hearing in his right ear. The accompanying aural hallucinations inspired DeRosa to start Aarktica, a mostly instrumental, guitar-based atmospheric project that still remains active. Aarktica’s debut release No Solace In Sleep (Silber Records, 2000) was described by George Parsons of Dream Magazine as "…songlike as a sedated Durutti Column, or as ectoplasmic as Flying Saucer Attack sleepwalking through Windy & Carl’s home movies of their trip to Iceland.”
In the difficult years following his hearing loss DeRosa began studying Indian classical vocal music with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. His studies with them (and later, Michael Harrison) would be particularly influential to DeRosa and affect all of his musical output from that time forward.
Around the time of Aarktica’s 2003 release Pure Tone Audiometry, Jon Pareles of the New York Times wrote, “Aarktica’s songs are extended reveries, built on loops of guitars and drums and occasional voices. The musical elements hover and circle, float by or bristle with distortion as the songs drift through serenity and trouble.”
Throughout the 2000s, DeRosa continued performing and releasing music as Aarktica, in addition to playing guitar with New York City chamber pop ensemble Flare. DeRosa also briefly recorded under the name Pale Horse and Rider, releasing two albums of urban country songs during this time. Rob O’Connor at CMJ remarked “DeRosa’s not unlike the downcast end of Springsteen. ‘Jersey Coast Line’ [from 2002’s These Are The New Good Times] could very well be Nebraska‘s 11th track.”
In 2006, DeRosa lent his voice to Stephin Merritt’s opera “The Peach Blossom Fan”, as the role of Hou Fang Yu. Some of his contributions were first featured on Merritt’s Showtunes album (Nonesuch, 2006). “The Peach Blossom Fan” became available in its entirety in 2008 (Nonesuch).
DeRosa continues to record as Aarktica, his most recent releases being 2009/10’s In Sea and In Sea Remixes.
In August 2011, both of DeRosa's Dead Leaves Rising albums were released digitally by Silber Records.
Also in September 2011, DeRosa will unveil his first eponymous release, the Anchored EP, described by Ed Park (The Believer) as "a quartet of gorgeously layered chamber-pop shanties."
Dead Leaves Rising was the project born from the ashes of DeRosa’s first musical project Fade, which was active from 1993-1995 while he was still in high school. He released two cassettes under this moniker, 1993’s Pale, Broken Truths and 1995’s Windows, and performed his first concerts in New York City. Musically, it can best be described as minimal dark folk.
DLR’s first album Shadow Complex was recorded from September 1996-January 1997, at Waterlands Studio in Colts Neck, NJ. DeRosa funded the project through part-time jobs during his senior year of high school and released the CD on his own Brighter Records imprint in June of that year. It was limited to 500 copies on matte art paper, hand-assembled, and included a comic that DeRosa drew. DeRosa made up the term “shadow complex” to describe the social phenomenon he saw in a lot of his (often older) friends and acquaintances: 20-somethings from affluent upbringings with college educations, doing hard drugs and looking for reasons to be miserable. As someone who grew up feeling extremely detached, he couldn’t imagine why someone would want to “portray” that mood as glamorous, as those in the gothic community had.
In the years that followed, DeRosa began his ambient/guitar project Aarktica, released a cassette of downtempo ambient/electronic music as Still, joined the NYC chamber pop ensemble Flare, and graduated from NYU. It wasn’t until 2001 that DeRosa released the second and final DLR album "Waking Up On The Wrong Side Of No One" on Plow City Records. This release displayed DeRosa waning from the brooding, gothic sounds of the first album, and toward a folkier, dark indie rock sound.
Label problems plagued the release from the start, and the album fell largely into obscurity. Frustrated and now involved in other projects (Aarktica and Flare), DeRosa laid the project to rest in 2002.
Pale Horse and Rider was Jon DeRosa’s rock/country project, which picked up where his previous project Dead Leaves Rising left off. As DeRosa’s interest in classic country songwriting eclipsed his interest in goth/dark folk sounds, PHR became the outlet for those songs.
Pale Horse and Rider’s first recorded output can be heard on "The Alcohol EPs" (Silber Records, 2002), a split release with Remora and Rivulets. These songs were rough, acoustic demos recorded in his Brooklyn apartment on a borrowed 8-track cassette recorder.
DeRosa continued to write and hone his songs, and in the Summer of 2002 recorded PHR’s debut full-length album "These Are The New Good Times" (Darla Records, 2003) in the decommissioned Sacred Heart Church in Duluth, Minnesota with the help of Low’s Alan Sparhawk. The church’s natural acoustics and reverb were thoroughly utilized, offsetting the very “urban” nature of DeRosa’s songs. Sparhawk contributed vocals to the album, while additional vocals and instruments were contributed by Nathan Amundson (Rivulets), Charles Newman (Flare) and future bandmate Marc Gartman.
After the album’s release, DeRosa began playing and writing with Marc Gartman back in New York City and eventually joined Gartman’s band (Marc Gartman Band) for live performances. This band featured Gerald Menke on pedal steel guitar and Mike Pride on drums.
When the time came to record a second PHR album, DeRosa enlisted the band to record with him, and asked Gartman to share songwriting duties. The band traveled to Shelbyville, Kentucky to record with Paul Oldham (Palace Brothers, et al.). The result of these sessions was the album Moody Pike (Darla Records/Agenda Records, 2004).
A drastic departure from the sometimes-fragile acoustic sounds of the first album, PHR was now a driving 4-piece barroom rock band that somehow still maintained the sensitivity and insightfulness of both songwriters’ earlier works. DeRosa and Gartman trade off nearly song-for-song, and their distinct styles are clearly marked; DeRosa opting for the urban, and focusing on the recklessness of youth, Gartman coming from a more pastoral and introspective place.
After the release of Moody Pike, the band largely scattered to the winds to focus on various respective projects. While DeRosa never officially ended Pale Horse and Rider, the band has not been active since 2006.
Aarktica was conceived in the winter of 1998 with Jon DeRosa’s permanent loss of hearing in one ear as a distraction from his other musical interests. The first album "No Solace in Sleep" (Silber Records, 2000) was a series of minimal guitar and tape compositions, glacially paced and effected, recorded on a 4-track cassette recorder in various NYU dorm rooms.
Aarktica soon followed up with the Morning One EP on Ochre Records (UK) in 2001.
Soon after, Aarktica released "Or You Could Just Go Through Your Whole Life and Be Happy Anyway, Bliss Out v.18" (Darla Records, 2002) and "Pure Tone Audiometry" (Silber Records, 2003). These releases combine lo-fi electro, noise and shoegaze with the ambient textures of modern composers like Morton Feldman and Ingram Marshall, defining Aarktica’s innovative drone pop hybrid. These were also the first Aarktica albums to feature guest musicians to realize DeRosa’s ultimate goal: to create drones and textures from the timbres of instruments, not solely from reverb units and delay pedals.
It was also during this time that DeRosa began his classical Indian vocal studies with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Their lessons would be extremely influential to DeRosa and would affect all of his musical output, in every genre from this time forward. DeRosa also studied extensively with Michael Harrison, a former disciple of Young and Zazeela, and a composer specializing in harmonic tuning systems.
Aarktica’s fourth full-length release "Bleeding Light" (Darla Records, 2005) was an homage to New York City, in both its lyrics and compositions. DeRosa enlisted many friends and young NYC free-jazz luminaries (Nate Wooley, Seth Misterka, Mike Pride, Harry Rosenblum), forgoing the often glacial guitars, for a more chaotic, eerie and psychedelic sound.
After releasing the limited "Ocean" split 12' with Aaron Spectre on Berlin’s Moonbunny Records, Aarktica relocated to Southern California in Summer 2007 and released its fifth album "Matchless Years" (Darla Records) in Fall 2007.
In Summer 2008, DeRosa moved back to Brooklyn, NY to work on the sequel to Aarktica’s 2000 debut "No Solace In Sleep." The result was "In Sea" (Silber Records, 2009), a return to Aarktica’s original guitar/ambient sound. A particular highlight of this release is Aarktica’s cover of the 1988 Danzig song 'Am I Demon?' which closes the album, and its accompanying video.
In 2010, Silber Records released "In Sea Remixes," a limited release of 500 copies of the entire "In Sea" album remixed entirely by other artists. Remixers include Suckers, Declining Winter, Landing, Yellow 6 and Keith Canisius.