Music - kodasblog.com

Koda’s Music Page

Music Background:

I didn’t start learning how to play guitar till I was 20-years-old in 1973. That is way late for most musicians, but I made up for the late start by playing 10 hours a day most days for the first 6 months, then 5 hours a day for the next 6 months. A year later I started playing bass in a 3-piece hard rock band called Warclear Newhead. The band would break up and reform every few months for the five years it lasted. We were so good people’s jaws would drop while watching us play, mostly because of the awesome guitarist, Steve Morrison, who built his own electronic effects from scratch, including stretching magnetic tape around mic stands to create really long loops. He is now in his 70s with his hands bent permanently held closed by arthritis. He said the reason we kept breaking up is because we were “all cowboys and no indians” – all leaders and not followers. Makes sense to me…

I came up with the idea for Audio Animation around that time and spent ten years trying to find financing before finally shelving that project.(Audio Animation is a theroretical process for generating 3-D animated images you see with your ears.)

I played bass in a couple other bands that went nowhere after that, but I mostly focused on writing songs on acoustic guitar.

In 1992 I met a keyboardist named Darren Weight who was only 19 at the time. I was studying electronic music at the University of Utah then. We worked roughly 40 hours a week on music, playing only originals, without regard to genre, for 7 years. The result was everything from silly, high energy rock to acoustic ballads to spacey psychedelic stuff. In 1998 he got offered a job paying really big money managing a dance club and no longer had time for our “band” which only recorded and never played iive. I put the best spacey sounding music together to create the Head CD by Psychic Trance Fur in 1998. I made 1,000 CDs and sent copies to at least 100 radio stations and record labels, but the music didn’t fit in any existing genre and I think that is why it didn’t go anywhere. (If you like Pink Floyd you will like Psychic Trance Fur, but it sounds nothing like that band.)

*****

Review by William Athey, The Event, October 29, 1998. –“Space rockers will love Head. Ravers in pursuit of a safe region for chilling out will love Head. Graphic artists will marvel at the CD booklet’s colors. Psychic Trance Fur represents an underground I’ve never experienced previously. Don’t look for this duo to appear in a local club anytime soon. One has to purchase Head for the experience. Sit in a comfortable chair and trip out.”

*****

By that time I was writing about metaphysics and music became more of a hobby. I put together an EP of spacey songs I did alone and released that under the Psychic Trance Fur name. I created the Koda’s Music Sampler CD (image below) as a gift for friends and people I met. 200 were made and I still have a few left. The first 11 songs of The Sampler CD (which you can play below) are the entirety of the Head album, plus there is some newer stuff and a few acoustic guitar songs. The Head CD starts out pretty weird, so if you only have time to listen to 1 or 2 songs I suggest beginning with #11, “Wind and Sea” (an acoustic guitar instrumental with an arrangement) then try #5, “Hike Like a Tree.”

I released a collection of acoustic guitar songs as an album called “The Early Years” by Koda.

The often silly, high energy rock material was released as an album called “What the…huh?” under the band name Huh? I admit most of that stuff isn’t all that great in terms of “art” but it was fun to play!

All the released music can be streamed on Spotify. $5 Patreon supporters have access to download CD quality files of the Sample CD below and every week I will upload a new song there, many of them never heard by the general public before. You can listen to the songs on the Sample CD using the player below.

Thanks a ton for reading all this. I hope you feel it was worth your time. I think I can guarantee that you will REALLY like at least some of these songs. They are art rather than entertainment, and “Hike Like a Tree,” for example, took us 4 months of full time work to complete (finally give up on).