Carmen Caruso

Bio:

.. Carmen Caruso was born in Seattle, WA and grew up in the cold and rainy, yet strangely beautiful northwest. She began playing her first instrument, a Baldwin piano, at the ripe age of 5. By age 6, she had decided to pursue a career as musician, a decision she never questioned since. At age 8, she joined the Seattle Girls' Choir, where she learned to how to blend, hold a part, and sightsing. By the time she reached college, she had learned how to play several different instruments, including piano, saxophone, clarinet, and guitar. At college as a voice performance major, Carmen soaked up information like a sponge from her professors and peers. She started singing in rock bands, having to lie about her age to get into venues. It was also then that she began to seriously write songs in her home studio. She began to take classes outside of her university on music engineering, and after school, began interning at studios such as Jack Straw Productions, the Plant, and Different Fur Recording Studios.

After college, Carmen stayed in the Seattle area for a year trying to find work. Times were tough. After a year without finding anything promising, Carmen packed all of her belongings and moved down to San Francisco in search of a music career. Instead, she found a job a start-up music recommendation company, where she worked at for two years, becoming exposed to thousands of artists she had never heard of before. She become exposed to new ideas, and genres but had no time to write music. In a do-or-die attempt, she saved up funds to pay for her portfolio costs, in the hopes that she could get into grad school and have time to write music.

Luckily, she was admitted to Dartmouth's Electro-Acoustic Music graduate program. She put her time to good use, learning about experimental music, digital signal processing, and electronics, as well as starting a group with her peers called Electrocab, performing in New England and New York.

Carmen returned home to the bay area with a renewed sense of vision and purpose. She moved in a house of USF students and began recording her debut album the Tree Philosophies in a small drafty attic, mixing at friends' houses and in her car. She released The Tree Philosophies in October. She also founded and currently performs with a group called Odd Owl, a San Franscisco-based trio that blends indie-folk with electronic beats. (http://www.myspace.com/oddowl) Some venues she has performed at include Hotel Cafe and the Gypsy Den in LA, the Rockit Room, Maggie McGarry's, the Retox and Cafe Royale in San Francisco, the Laila Lounge in New York, the Spheris Gallery, the Outpost in Boston, and the Ballard Firehouse in Seattle. Her music has been discussed on NHPR, Pirate Cat Radio and KUPS The Sound, and her compositions have been featured at the 2008 International Computer Music Conference, the Festival of New Musics at Dartmouth College, the Way to Go Out series, the Boston CyberArts Festival, and the Dartmouth-Hartt Music Exchange. She continues to make her way through the music industry wasteland...

The Tree Philosophies

Now available on iTunes and Amazon

Member Since:

October 05, 2006

Influences:

Bjork, Sufjan Stevens, PJ Harvey, TV on the Radio, Explosions in the Sky, Radiohead, Stereolab, Joanna Newson, the Beta Band, the Eels, Philip Glass, Beck, Andrew Bird, Carissa's Weird, Sigur Ros

Sounds Like:

A musical fusion between indie rock, folk, and electronic music. Carmen's main emphasis, however, is her voice. She enjoys creating layers of vocal harmonies. She also uses her voice as a wordless instrument, and bends her voice into her music in unexpected ways. !!! Start Code To Apply Top Banner !!!! ...... ...... Custom top banner code by Eileen ..

!!! End Code To Apply Top Banner !!!

Record Label:

Odd Owl Records