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
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 learn how to sightread. 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. But she wasn't quite happy being just a performer. 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. It was also then that she began to seriously write songs in her home studio.
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 and yet...she had no time to write music. She was getting nowhere. 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. But she knew her true passion was to write music that leaned closer to pop, not noise.
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 Banana Rock!, a San Franscisco trio from the Sunset district with a sound that can only be described as "hard pop". She plans to tour next year. Some venues she has performed at include 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 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...
.. Hi there Carmen Caruso first of all we'd like to say thanks for being our myspace pal. We wanted to make sure you knew the reason incase we suddenly vanish off of your friends list. The movement we've started for indie artists has grown significantly and consumes all of our time these days. We seldom sign into our myspace account and this is making several people believe that we are ignoring them. We are not ignoring anyone, we wanted everyone to know that. What we're doing has become so busy we just don't have the time for myspace any longer, so in all honesty we are probably going to just close our myspace account.
Many people wanted to use us in the future so if you were one of those people make sure you bookmark the link below so that in the event that we do close our myspace account you won't lose contact with us. I wish you the best of luck in your music career. Thanks again for being our myspace pal.
yo- it's about time yous gots a comment. whys i gots to do this from new zealand is crazy! yo yo to the carmen! i sent you a letter to sirensystems but it rejected me. what up with that? hope classes are stimulating your brain like a snakes ass in the middle of the desert in mid july. keep it real-
cheers
