Death Star Architects: From the Vault
This page is purely a diary entry and an archive for the curious listener.
Death Star Architects was an all-original project between 2014 and 2015 that let me stretch my creative boundaries into heavier, more progressive rock territory. Unfortunately, the original studio multitracks were lost years ago, leaving me with only the raw stereo mixes of our sessions.
Rather than letting the music sit on a hard drive forever, I recently ran the remaining tracks through LANDR mastering to polish them up just enough to share. They aren’t pristine, big-budget studio productions, but they are an honest time capsule of a specific creative era, a lot of intense guitar tracking, and some song ideas I’m still proud of. Drop the headphones in and have a listen if you want to hear a different, heavier side of my playing.
The Lineup and the Garage Jams
The band started entirely by chance while I was still playing with TTR. I bumped into Mark Reccord, the former bass player from the V3 lineup of Mean Streak. Mark and I had always gotten along great, and during our conversation, we realized we both had a strong itch to create some heavy, original music.
As luck would have it, I knew a phenomenal drummer, Brad Wells, who was also my tenant at the time. Since I had a dedicated jam spot, the three of us started getting together once a week for about an hour or two to see what would happen.
Our writing workflow was incredibly efficient. We would jam, and I would multitrack record everything we came up with. Afterward, I’d sit down with the audio, work through the raw tracking, and arrange the best pieces into cohesive song structures. We came up with a massive backlog of ideas and had full songs put together in short order.
I handled all the lead vocals during this initial writing phase, but as the songs took shape, I suggested we bring in Percy McDonald from TTR. Percy is an amazing rock singer, and I knew his vocal power would take the project to the next level. By the time he fronted the band, the vast majority of the record was already written, though he did contribute great ideas to the final few tunes we locked down.
A One-Night Stand
Digging back into the archives, I actually unearthed our old, long-forgotten ReverbNation bio from that era, which captured our mindset perfectly at the time:
“We are an all original band that jams once a week on average for 1–2 hours. Over the course of the year we have written a number of songs; probably enough for an album. We played our first show Dec 20th, 2014. Hopefully we will do several in 2015!”
As it turned out, that debut show on December 20, 2014—playing alongside a great local band called The Sea Dogs—would be our only live performance.
The gig itself was a lot of fun, but it brought about a quick realization for me. I looked at the local landscape and realized there really wasn’t anywhere for a niche, original progressive rock band to go. We weren’t in a position to pack up and tour, and opportunities for local slots were few and far between.
Ultimately, I wanted to be active, performing constantly, and out in the world, rather than spending all my energy locked away in a garage writing and rehearsing for months on end just to play once a year. The project ran its course, but the riffs we captured on those stereo mixes remain a stellar piece of my musical history.
For anyone who wants to see what we were doing here is a rehearsal of an original which is not on the archival album I put on streaming:
Here is a link to the archival album on Spotify.