Home  Bio and History  Discography/ Music  Press  News Archive  Links  Words  Contact

    " 'It's 68 minutes of pure chaos', space-zapped guitarist/ snappy multi-instrumentalist/ zippy production guy Ryan Settee (ex- Kaspar Hauser) says of his current psyche rawk project titled Night Songs, by his alter ego, High Watt Electrocutions.

    'I love playing in regular rock bands', Settee says. 'I'm a huge fan of the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo aspect, but I want to step outside of that and have some freedom of expression.' 'With music you can get a lot out of repetition. If you play the same thing over and over again, you create a lot of opportunities to cut and paste and mix things. I kind of wanted to achieve a tribal thing with the music on the album--like cavemen around a fire beating on mammoth hides'.

    They'd have to use tusks to tell time, too. In Settee's self-penned promo/ press proclamation he suggests HWE has been described in some mythological press cavern like this: 'Dubbed maximum minimalism' and drawing heavily from both obscure to late '60's/ early 70's psycechedelia, as well as late '60's/ early 70's proto metal, High Watt Electrocutions is admittedly 30 or 40 years behind the times or 30 or 40 years ahead, depending on which way you see it, or spossibly a million years past any trend, battling both good and evil in it's sonic soundscapes. Recorded in a basement by one person, it is a unified, if perfectly imperfect vision'. Earth to high Watt: it's better than OK to sound like this. Take it as a compliment.

    The new album is a local spaced-out smashterpeace that takes basement concepts to a whole new level. Settee says Night Songs is 'sequenced in a manner to reflect various times throughout the night, starting at 9:30 pm and ending up at 6 am, with an unanswered musical statement that mirrors the uncertainty that the new day brings.'

    Ah, so it's a bit of a concept alb? 'My creative team of writers came up with that', Settee laughs while discussing his guitar noodling and his CD-distribution forays while settled in his basement on a -25 C winter evening. 'I'm pretty much self-taught. I go by ear and feel. About 80 percent of the solos on the album are improvised'. 'I've worked various jobs over the years and shit, but there's a certain part of me that has a substantial dream. Making this music after work makes me feel energized, but if I had to do it 24 hours a day, I might not be as inspired'.

    Considering the quality of the sound on the disc-which features standout brain blitzers such as Psychedelic Meltdown, Dragged Into The Vortex and The Thief Is Caught-it's hard to imagine a time when Settee isn't inspired. 'I used a standalone Roland 8 track at the beginning, and I moved up to an AKAI 16 track digital unit,' Settee says. 'Originally I was just going to put the album up on MySpace for fun. I recorded it over six years and I actually have another two albums' worth of stuff. This is sort of a greatest hits version.' 'It's on Instrospection Records', he continues. 'It's definetely a difficult thing running a label, too. On the bright side I did the production on my own time. I spent hundreds of hours on it. I would have had to spend at least $50,000 on production costs if I wouldn't have done it myself.'

    There's absolutely no talk about a HWE tour or even a CD release at this point, but Settee says he definetely wants to perform songs from the album live. 'It's a studio thing right now, but people have been asking when i'm playing', he says. 'The music is inspired by Hawkwind, Spiritualized and the droning side of the Stooges.' 'A High Watt Electrocution is a shock. A big part of the album is the shock. It's a shock when I tell friends or family members about it. Electricity is a huge influence because it fuels the creation of everything i've done. I'm trying to get a band together to pull this off live. So far it's been a revolving-door art project for the past 6 years.' 'I actually put out an ad on MySpace, and I had about 10 responses, but they were all guitarists. I'm thinking about doing it the Big Black way, with a drum machine.' "

Best viewed at 1024 X 768 pixels resolution

Contact: