Leak

Collection Contents

#		Title	Length
1		Leak	11:12	Play
2		Android Cat Dreams Of Mice	13:51	Play
3		Starry Night	12:03	Play
4		Painting Earthtones In Orbit	9:16	Play
5		Bullet Train	1:08	Play
6		Nightshift At The Baby Mecha Nursery	5:23	Play

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Description

Leak is the first album from Sensitive Chaos, a solo project of Atlanta-based producer and electronic musician Jim Combs.

Space Station Soma FM (spaced out ambient and midtempo electronica format)- "Android Cat Dreams Of Mice," from Leak as added Week of November 6, 2006.

AMBiENT PiNG RADiO (ambient/chill/downtempo format)- "Android Cat Dreams Of Mice," "Painting Earthtones In Orbit," and "Nightshift At The Baby Mecha Nursery" from Leak were added and featured on Week of October 22, 2006 playlist.

Aural Innovations Radio (electronic/ambient/space format)- "Painting Earthtones In Orbit" added October 1, 2006 to The Electronic Cottage show playlist.

Alternative radio station KTUH FM in Honolulu added Leak to their RPM rotation in early September 2006 (playing along side of Board Of Canada, Four Tet, DJ Logic, Basement Jaxx, Zero 7, and Cut Chemist).

Jerry Kranitz at Aural Innovations Radio just sent the new October 2006 show playlist from The Electronic Cottage (show ..22) including Sensitive Chaos - "Painting Earthtones in Orbit" (from Leak) on the playlist.

Two songs from Leak were played back-to-back on Darrell Burgan's September 23 and September 30, 2006 Blue Water Drift Dive ambient music show on StillStream.com. The songs played were "Painting Earthtones In Orbit" and "Nightshift At The Baby Mecha Nursery".

Bill Fox played "Bullet Train" on his September 21, 2006 Galactic Travels radio show airs each Thursday at 11:04 pm on NPR member station WDIY 88.1 FM, Allentown and Bethlehem, PA, 93.9 FM in Easton, PA and Phillipsburg, NJ, 93.7 FM in Fogelsville and Trexlertown, 92.9 FM on Service Electric Cable, and webcasting on the internet.

And Finnish Broadcasting Company radio station YLE Radio 1 - Space Junk program played "Nightshift At The Baby Mecha Nursery" on their September 10th show.

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Jims collaborators on Leak were musician Brian Good, who contributed two soprano saxophone solos to the album, and visual designer Eleanor Grosch, whose logo design graces the CD cover.

Sensitive Chaos started for Combs in 2005 with the acquisition of an analog MIDI sequencer, a piece of music hardware that records notes from a synthesizer keyboard and immediately plays them back in sequential order. I had seen this particular piece of gear, the Sequentix P3, at the 2004 Different Skies music festival. It was being operated in an extraordinary fashion by the English synthesist Paul Nagle (Joint Intelligence Committee, Binar). I grew up on the music of Kraftwerk, Tomita, Tangerine Dream, Michael Honig, and Jean Michel Jarre, and loved the synth work of Erasure, Depeche Mode, and The Orb/Orbital/William Orbit. Id also accumulated what some would call an entire synthesizer museum over the years, have a well-outfitted computer recording setup, but had never owned an analog sequencer. Paul was improvising these incredibly complex and changing patterns out of thin air and I was blown away by the immediacy of the instrument and the wonderful synth lines being generated. Pauls P3 was built from a kit, but the P3s inventor, Colin Fraser, started a run of production units in the spring of 2005 and I got the 12th unit built, one of the first in the States. I started performing with it right away, but it took months before the lights really started coming on.

Combs epiphany came in the fall of 2005 after an innocuous solo gig. I had been asked to improvise some down-tempo intermission music for a local event and I took a small setup including the P3. The event was noisy so I had a hard time hearing myself, but what I could hear was sounding good, so I just kept improvising and layering loops upon loops. When I got back in the studio and listened to what I had banged into the P3, I was astounded. What should have sounded like a complete mess was organized, and well, composed. With a little arrangement, that track morphed into the final track on the CD, Nightshift At The Baby Mecha Nursery.

That watershed moment led to a quick succession of new songs. I must have knocked out one song a week for a month or so. These songs were much different than the ambient material TouchXtone normally created, though I was using similar improvised composing methods. These new songs were much more verse/chorus/middle eight, and I saw they were going down a different path. All of a sudden, I had an hours worth of material and realized I was making a solo album. An influential book on the physical beauty of water from Combs high school years gave name to the venture.

The beginning of 2006 found Combs creating new songs and looking for vocalist collaborators. About half the songs I was composing were instrumentals and the other half were firmly in the synth pop realm. All the synth pop sounds I had grown up with started resurfacing and it seemed natural to find a singer to help pull them together. Unfortunately, finding a singer proved difficult, and I ended up temporarily shelving the synth pop material and just concentrated on the tunes that could stand on their own as instrumentals.

Luckily, a series of solo performances in the spring of 2006 yielded three new instrumentals, all of which found their way onto the new CD. Painting Earthtones In Orbit and Leak resulted from performances at the Aurora Coffee/Criminal Records Songwriters series in March and May, respectfully, and Starry Night was a song literally created by using cards selected at random by the audience at a benefit concert in May. The book Sensitive Chaos is about how these incredible patterns result out of the seemingly random flows of water. I was striving to produce slowly evolving patterns of sound out of some very random playing on my part at my solo performances. Starry Night was the extreme in this case as different audience members picked the tempo of the piece and the notes I used as I made up the actual song in the moment. While its standard procedure to compose in the studio and play the songs out live, I did the opposite, composing live into the P3 at gigs and bringing the sequences back to the studio to arrange and record.

I had mixed and sequenced the album at the end of May before reaching out to Brian Good to put a soprano sax solo on a couple of the songs. Brian and I have performed together at the Different Skies festival the past couple of years, and I knew his playing would be brilliant and lend a nice organic quality to the overall mix. Leak and Starry Night really came alive once he added his magic. Those songs were the last two I created for the CD and the sax parts took them to another level. I remixed those two songs and changed the order of the CD; Brians contribution was that significant.

The other collaborator on the album was Eleanor Grosch, a designer from Philadelphia known for her poster art work for Wilco, Death Cab For Cutie, Edwin McCain, and most recently, her own line of Keds sneakers. I had seen Eleanors work on display at an Octane Coffee gallery showing last December and I simply reached out to her to ask if she would be willing to work on a small music project. To my surprise and to her great credit, she said yes. We decided to focus on a logo and the final form evolved over a series of iterations in the spring of 2006. The little drip at the end of the logo was the last thing added and I laughed out loud when I saw it. Eleanor had no way to know the logo summed up so many different threads and ideas that went into the album. Its a very different style than Ive known her to use in the past. But it works simply because it remains true to the core concepts of order, randomness, and fluidity.

While there are no plans to perform the Leak material, Combs has solo performances booked through the end of the year and is moving forward with plans for a new Sensitive Chaos CD this time next year. Ive got all those synth pop songs waiting for the right voice to come along and Ive also collected a bunch of new sequences that I need to review as potential future instrumentals. Im hoping the next Sensitive Chaos CD will feature a balance of both.

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Jim is also known for his work with electronic duo TouchXtone, a 2005 Atlanta Creative Loafing Best Of Award winner (best local electronic act), as well as being one of the co-hosts for the Aurora Coffee/Criminal Records Songwriters Series held each Saturday night at the Virginia-Highlands Aurora Coffee location.

TouchXtone was formed in November of 2003, has released 12 CDs, and was named Best Local Electronic Act in the Atlanta Creative Loafing Best Of Atlanta 2005 issue. They have performed in Georgia (Eleven 50, Java Monkey, Agnes Scott College's Delafield Planetarium, Miro's Garden, Brandyhouse, EyeDrum), Chapel Hill (Nightlight), and Philadelphia (electro-music 2005 Festival).

Jim also plays regular solo ambient looping gigs under his own name and hosts regular Saturdays at the Aurora Coffee/Criminal Records Songwriters Evenings in Atlanta (thanks Brad Jones & Criminal Records).

Jim also collaborated at both the 2004 and 2005 Different Skies electronic music festivals, both as an ensemble player and as a member of Phosphene Grid. And he will be attending and performing at Different Skies 2006 this September. His contributions to Different Skies 2004 can be heard on the various artists compilation DVD "Arcs And Angles" on the Atomic City label available at Filmbaby.com.

Jim's most recent writing is an article "Why Is My DAW My DAW?" published in the December 2005 issue of Recording Magazine.

Jim Combs is an Oklahoma-born (Poteau) and Texas-raised (Dallas) keyboardist/composer, recording producer/engineer, multimedia artist, and writer who began my musical forays both playing piano and manipulating tape machines while recording feedback. Synthesizers entered his life when he built a PAIA synthesizer kit and heard Rick Wakeman for the first time on a quadraphonic 8-track copy of The Six Wives Of Henry VIII. He's been making noise and music with synthesizers and recording gear ever since.

His love of electronics and creative arts led him to a Bachelors of Arts degree in Journalism: Radio, TV, Film from the University of Oklahoma (with several semesters spent in the School Of Musics Electronic Music lab) and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from NYUs Tisch School of the Arts. Along his winding career path, Combs has produced for video, audio, computer-based multimedia, interactive television, and the web. He started his career at CBS Records where he held positions of College Marketing Manager and Single Records Coordinator and got to hang out with just about every late 70s/early 80s music icon on the road at the time.

He produced his first independent record with the post-punk/neo-reggae/power pop Dallas band New Jetz, also playing synthesizers and organ. This led to a "Best Unsigned Band" nod from the Dallas Observer.

Jim packed up his keyboards and moved to New York City when a chance arose to learn from famed New York dance producer Boris Midney. Combs engineered sessions for former New Jetz songwriter Kendall Marsh, as well as downtown performers One X One and Steppin Razor. He also mixed live sound at venues as diverse as Studio 54 and CBGBs. The remaining 12 years in New York saw independent record productions and keyboard sessions for Laura Toy (1986), Major Minor (1989), John Harvey (1991) and The Martians (1993), all the while continuing to compose and produce over 60 of his own eclectic synthesizer music pieces.

While moving to Atlanta in 1997, Combs had most of his recording studio and instruments stolen out of the moving van by the moving van drivers. Luckily, insurance covered replacement equipment and with the bevy of new high tech gear, he immediately completed an ambient music and spoken word album for new age spiritualist Katheline Curry. In 2001, Jim produced and performed keyboards and electronic percussion for Atlanta alternative rock newcomer Natasha Goddards first single. He founded TouchXtone with Michael Thomas Roe in 2003.

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OTHER MUSIC TO CHECK OUT:

TouchXtone: http://cdbaby.com/all/touchxtone
Ozone Player: http://cdbaby.com/cd/ozoneplayer4
MindSpiral: http://cdbaby.com/cd/mindspiral
Inquisitor Betrayer: http://cdbaby.com/cd/inquisitorbetrayer