Home page of Jim Russell
<himself@jimmyrussell.com>
Nutley NJ, USA
[Main]
[Free Music]
[Family Tree]
[Theatre]
[Links]
[My PGP Key]
If you don't want to wade through the gory details, and just want to download the music, you can jump directly to the download area at www.mp3.com/antrim/.
It's all folk music. You ever hear a horse play music? -- Doc Watson
Antrim Studios is the current moniker for a virtual band that releases music on the internet. This means that I record almost everything in the basement of my house with a guitar and a computer, and then pretend there's a whole band. If you think I'm the only one doing this, you haven't been paying attention. Or don't care, which is fine by me. (Rule 6: Never edit web pages after midnight. You begin to ramble.)
All the songs are offered free for the downloading, in accordance with the
Free Music Philosophy.
If you react strongly enough to the music to comment, you can
e-mail me by clicking here.
I used to be in a real band. I was the bassist for The Remainders, a New Jersey bar band in the 1980's. We did some good, original, Power Pop Rock And Roll Guitar Band Music. We were all, however, quite successful at our Day Jobs, and eventually disbanded.
While we were going strong, I was learning to produce low-budget recordings on 4-track cassette. I was also becoming a computer expert (that was my Day Job). These days, my music studio and computer workstation have merged into a vast conglomerate that my wife calls "the mess in the cellar".
Two of the other Remainders have a strong presence here at Antrim.
You'll notice that two songs here are credited to Bill Greenrose as songwriter, lead vocalist, and guitarist. Bill and I have known each other since we were 5 years old (that's a long time), and we've been playing guitars and singing songs together for most of our lives. Even though he lives in New Hampshire and I live in New Jersey, he's still my karmic twin (Don't ask me to explain, it'll just scare you). Luckily, we both use the same digital audio software (that would be Cakewalk), so we trade tracks back and forth. The thing is, I produce finished product from them. I don't know what the hell he does with the ones I send him.
My songwriting partner for the past fourteen years is another former Remainder, master lyricist Jim Moore. When we were in high gear, we were pumping out songs at a rate of three or four a week, so I've got quite a catalog to choose from for future productions. Our virtual publishing company, Meridian Stone Music, is so-named as a bit of wordplay on Twelve O'Clock Rock, an early, discarded name for the Remainders.
As for the rest of the old band: My brother Jerry Russell, the other half of the Russell Bros. Rhythm Section, whom I've known even longer than Bill, has moved out to sunny Arizona, sans drums. One of these days I will convince him to learn to program his rhythms in silicon. And Chris Wilson, equally at home with an acoustic piano or a guitar with the amp turned up to eleven, has so far proved entirely resistant to the computer age. Bill and I did surreptitiously record one of his inspired improvisations (which he calls "noodling") onto a MIDI stream, so he may yet show up here.
I spent years trying to get my music onto the internet, and now it's scattered all over the place. My main repository of late is mp3.com, an incredible site that attracts thousands of musicians and bands. Other sites that have kindly provided me free space on the web include free-music.com, geocities.com, tripod.com, and nvg.unit.no. My sites there are in various states of disarray.
These are MP3 files -- if you don't know about them, or need software to play them, go visit mp3.com for more details. They run about 1 megabyte per minute, but the sound quality is more than worth the download.