Damon Aaron

Los Angeles musician and producer Damon Aaron has led a unique and widely varied career ranging from session work with artists like Divine Styler, Rocky Dawuni, and Breakestra to his own eclectic albums as a soul-folk singer/songwriter. Comfortably merging jazz, hip-hop, electronic music, African traditions, and folk, he amassed an impressive spread of collaborations throughout the 2000s while releasing solo albums like 2005's Ballast and 2008's Highlands. A regular contributor to Carlos Niño's Build an Ark project, Aaron also launched the Contact Field Orchestra, a unique venture that combines vintage field recordings with experimental composition and production. This project yielded a series of acclaimed releases for the Hit + Run label in the mid-2010s. Growing up in Los Angeles, Aaron absorbed a multitude of musical education from his family; the influences of folk and bluegrass came from his mother, while his banjo-playing grandfather taught him how to fingerpick. Meanwhile, his stepfather, a KROQ DJ, introduced him to electronic music and synthesizers. With this toolkit, he spent much of the 1990s developing multiple disciplines as a singer, MC, guitarist, and producer, leading and playing in bands of all stripes. By the early 2000s, Aaron had forged collaborative relationships with artists like l-Wolf, Telefon Tel Aviv, and seminal rapper Divine Styler. He also began recording his own songs which appeared on compilations like the 2001 set Dublab Presents: Freeways. His first two longer solo releases, 2003's Cymbidium and 2004's Eaves, introduced fans to a soulful vocalist and songwriter with a vivid imagination and a penchant for genre-averse production. 2005's full-length Ballast, with its mix of earthy appeal and electro flourishes, earned him a wider audience ahead of 2008's even broader Highlands. During the next decade, Aaron continued to collaborate with other artists, appearing on albums by Ethio-Cali, Leanna Rachel, and Rocky Dawuni while developing a new project called Contact Field Orchestra. Based around a box of unusual field recordings he unearthed at an estate sale, the project focused on hand-built instruments, contact microphones, and atmospheric textures. The first Contact Field Orchestra release appeared in 2012 on the Hit + Run label. Over the next few years, they issued two more outings including the 2015 cassette-only CFO X H+R Mixtape Nr. 2. He has also continued to perform as a solo artist at festivals around Europe.
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