John Vanderslice is a singer, songwriter, musician, and engineer who has cultivated a devoted following among fans of American independent music with his albums that combine sharp lyrical content with a warm, analog-based sound. That sound comes from the studio he founded in San Francisco in 1997, Tiny Telephone, which has played host to...More
John Vanderslice is a singer, songwriter, musician, and engineer who has cultivated a devoted following among fans of American independent music with his albums that combine sharp lyrical content with a warm, analog-based sound. That sound comes from the studio he founded in San Francisco in 1997, Tiny Telephone, which has played host to numerous other bands, some of which Vanderslice has produced or played with, including Okkervil River, Spoon, Death Cab For Cutie, Beulah, and The Mountain Goats.
Vanderslice grew up in Florida, Georgia, and Michigan before evntually moving to the San Francisco Bay area where he met up with bassist/vocalist Dan Carr, drummer/vocalist Matt Torrey, and guitarist/vocalist John Tyner, and formed the band Mk Ultra in 1994. The group's brand of brainy rock music gained the group a sizable local following, and the group released three independently released albums during the course of the 1990s, Mk Ultra (1994), Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1996), and The Dream Is Over (1999), before splitting up in 1999 after Tyner decided to leave the band.
After the break-up of Mk Ultra, Vanderslice started work on his solo debut, 2000's Mass Suicide Occult Figurines (Barsuk). Vanderslice toured in support of his album, and kept up a busy pace of recording and releasing albums over the next few years, while also helping to produce the 2005 Spoon album Gimme Fiction (Merge) and two Mountain Goats albums, We Shall All Be Healed (4AD, 2004), and Heretic Pride (4AD, 2008).
Vanderslice released six albums on Barsuk between 2000 and 2007. On his 2004 release Cellar Door (Barsuk), Vanderslice took on the voice of a whole host of fictional characters, and further refined his brand of indie-rock bliss; pairing over-amped drums up with jangling guitars, buzzing, ancient-sounding keyboards up against tinkling bells, and the tasteful use of strings. In 2009, he signed to Dead Oceans (a label associated with the Secretly Canadian and Jagjaguwar labels) and released Romanian Names, his seventh album.
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