Editor's Note:

Simpleton's music first came to me in a shoebox full of tapes. An abandoned baby on my doorstep, wailing into the early morning.

I'll admit it. I fancy myself a current-day Alan Lomax, a sound-collector out field-recording urban settings and artists in environments of distress. My current focus is on regional Midwest, outsider hip-hop and americana, itinerant music -- traditional and contemporary (Daniel Johnston, Mingering Mike, Wesley Willis, etc.) But the discovery of this unknown mid-career artist in a shoe box on my door step has been unsettling.

By minor accounts, simpleton is strictly subterranean, busking red and blue-line underground rail platforms in Chicago, IL. Others have claimed to have see him play his guitar and drum machine in the parks and on the corners of the North Side. But most who have heard his music say they only know it from found recordings: a shared mix-tape collection from a street corner newspaper box; Unlabeled, silvery cd singles inside books in the City Library; dubs on microcasette, left in thrift-store purchased answering machines and personal tape recorders.

What makes the discovery of an artist with ten albums and over 150 'published' songs so unsettling is that I can't tell whether or not the music is any good. The key criteria for me are all there: a self-taught aural interpreter - art brut; a pathological obsession/delusion; the lo-fi and disposable nature of the recordings. And yet the artist mostly sounds like a broken guitar, three loose strings played by a strangled goose. But! … the heart-broken backbeat … the obtuse lyrical schemes … the haunting, bizarre melodies … after countless listens, they become hard to shake. Which might be the point. Who's crazier? simpleton for making it, or me for continuing to listen -- to the personal struggles and protests, the political rants, the free-associative rhymes, or the introspective sledge hammer on the guitar?

To be honest, it was five shoe boxes full of tapes -- each containing a treasure trove of sludgy torch songs, soundtracks, folk and blues tunes, break-beat rhymes and lots of noise. An ethnomusicologist/collector friend praises the ephemeral, vanishing language of an individual culture -- where the writing and recording process melds with the performance. 'His is an aberrant voice, a folk singer for a different world. The sound of each song dying, painfully, buried again and again after each listen.'

Perhaps. But something keeps me coming back, anticipating every release. Shortly after Trends in American Cinema, simpleton and I met. The artist agreed to share his recordings for publishing on this site. I'm a collector, not a critic, and this site is merely a conduit -- that street-corner newspaper box on the internet. The lyrics, notes, record art and songs are all courtesy of the artist, and left in his voice. The collections presented here represent an aural history of a self-taught musician now 15 years in the making.

If a tree falls in the woods, and no ones's around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If simpleton is any proof, it does.

-BN

15 January 2010