David Karsten Daniels & Fight The Big Bull

Smoke

The second single to be taken from David Karsten Daniels & Fight the Big Bull’s glorious ‘I Mean To Live Here Still’ album, ‘Smoke’ was the subject of a hugely successful FatCat-run remix competition (managed through the label’s SoundCloud page) that yielded some genuinely stunning reinterpretations of the original and even inspired some of FatCat’s other assets to contribute.

Selected from a large pool of high-standard competition entries, present here is A Lily (aka James Vella of yndi halda)’s vocal cut-up and tropicalia flute-led mix, which develops an entirely different facet of the melody, bringing out delicate and previously unheeded aspects of the song.

On the original form of ‘Smoke’, Daniels writes:

"I really wanted to convey a sense of lightness with this track - a blissed out, almost druggy vibe that would contrast with a lot of the slower, darker moments on the rest of the record. Thoreau can come off a bit morose at times, but with this particular text I imagined him sitting outside at a fire at night, totally enjoying the present moment. My original demo used several interlocking afrobeat-ish guitar lines that Matt [White] eventually broke apart and moved over to the horns. Matt also pumped up the 'color' of the thing - muted horns, multiple basses, rattling percussion, whimsical flute...I remember us laughing in the control room at how it almost sounded like a game show theme or 70s cop show."


Daniels – a San Francisco-based, immensely talented, formally-trained composer/musician – made a tentative connection with Virginia’s Fight the Big Bull in 2008. The latter, led by White, exist loosely in the Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Ornette Coleman plane of jazz, yet are fiercely, often unpredictably, unique.

The collaboration took flight over 2009, as Daniels worked on a new set of music (a follow up to 2008’s gorgeous ‘Fear of Flying’ album), taking lyrics from the poems of 19th Century American author-poet Henry David Thoreau. Daniels began sending sketches of songs to White in September 2009. White scored arrangements – meticulously, masterfully put together – that flutter, trill, groove and crash, bracing and swelling around Daniels’ honeyed voice, densely weaving a vast, jubilant collage of sound in others.

Daniels flew out to Virginia in January 2010, joining the the band for a three-day, self-produced session at Lance Koehler’s Minimum Wage studios in Richmond, playing the tracks live, all together in one space. Daniels began an exhaustive mixing process after taking these recordings back to the West Coast, exchanging detailed notes online with White.

Already an accomplished live performer, both solo and with a band, David Karsten Daniels is planning 2010 live dates in the US with Fight the Big Bull, with Europe/UK dates to follow.