THE NARCISSIST
This is a concept album idea I birthed in the early days of the Covid-19 lock downs seeing as most of my musician friends were stuck at home, so I made a post on social media encouraging them to send me recordings of them playing anything they wanted on any instrument.
The premise behind this was for me to take all of these musical excerpts and piece them together to formulate songs, despite the players never having heard anything anyone else submitted. I was hoping to have more people on the project but some never made good on their word to deliver contributions, so I had to make due with what I had.
The sub-plot was the fact I wanted to make the record with 100% live instrumentation of people ACTUALLY playing instruments, as opposed to using computer software and electronics as per the norm. In turn these recordings contain absolutely no musical samples asides from various audio clips sampled from movies, etc.
I have had the album title in my head since 2019 and the concept of spoken word segments being in between each song, which was inspired by A Tribe Called Quest’s album “Midnight Marauders”. In a world of short attention spans I still strive to create something that is intended to be listened to from start to finish in it’s entirety.
For this release I was also very thrilled & honoured to commission and translate my vision to legendary artist Jeff Gaither in regards to the album cover, which is beyond a dream come true for me. I instantly fell in love with Jeff's art the first time I saw the cover of The Accused album "Martha Splatterhead's Maddest Stories Ever Told" back in 1988 and it still remains one of my favourite pieces of artwork in existence. As an artist myself, Jeff was very influential in my own drawing style growing up, so I truly am grateful to have worked with him & to now call him a friend.
It's been a very fun, interesting & challenging journey that took over three years to complete. It was very slow paced and somewhat methodical and also one of the first times I really invested myself financially over the course of a record. I also found myself suffering from lack of creativity and general interests at times throughout the pandemic years, and I definitely got sidetracked with a few other musical projects along the way... but alas it's finally time to embrace (or deface) "The Narcissist"...
DISCLAIMER:
The thoughts, ideas, views opinions & philosophies contained within the lyrics of all songs are solely those of myself, “Kabal” Kevin Theodoropolus (unless noted otherwise) and do not necessarily reflect those of the collective musicians involved in this project.
SIDE NOTE: I will be getting physical copies of this release in CD form so keep your eyes open for that if you are interested in purchasing a copy. There will also be a video companion for every song on the album uploaded to a playlist on my YouTube channel in the near future exclusively available at:
www.youtube.com/therealkabal
ARTWORK: Jeff Gaither
www.theartofgaither.com
This recording is dedicated to
the memory of Jason Dove & Dallas Good
