Tim Kinsella

A stalwart of Chicago indie music, Tim Kinsella has built up a prolific catalog of eccentric projects ranging from the experimental emo/post-rock of Joan of Arc and folk-punk of Friend/Enemy to the erratic art-pop of his duo project with wife Jenny Pulse. He founded the seminal early-'90s emo band Cap'n Jazz and over the next two decades either led or took part in groups like Owls, Make Believe, and Everyoned. His solo work has been similarly unusual; presented under alternate variations of his name (T. Kinsella, TK, Tim Kinsellas, Timothy J. Kinsella), he has released collections of acoustic field recordings (2007's Field Recordings of Dreams), collaborative cabaret-like interpretations (Sings the Songs of Marvin Tate by LeRoy Bach featuring Angel Olsen), and a 2016 collage consisting entirely of samples from David Bowie's Hunky Dory album. In the early 2020s, he started a musical collaboration with his wife, vocalist and electronic producer Jenny Pulse (Spa Moans). Kinsella is also a visual artist, filmmaker, and author. In 1989, while still in his teens, he and his brother Mike Kinsella formed Cap'n Jazz, a cult-favorite Midwestern emo outfit who released a number of singles and produced the influential but exhaustingly titled 1995 album Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards in the Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We've Slipped On and Egg Shells We've Tippy Toed Over (aka Shmap'n Shmazz) before disbanding that same year. Kinsella's next project, Joan of Arc, was longer lasting and ultimately more prolific. Moving away from their emo roots, Joan of Arc came to be known for wild experimentation, creating inspired albums like 1997's How Memory Works and 2000's The Gap out of an eclectic mix of synthetic samples, pastiche, and kinetic post-rock. Kinsella remained the band's only permanent member until its dissolution in 2020. A myriad of interconnected projects like Owls and Make Believe have been formed out of both Cap'n Jazz and Joan of Arc's lineups. Kinsella also took part in the 2004 indie supergroup Everyoned. In 2001, he began releasing solo music, issuing the EP He Sang His Didn't He Danced His Did on Troubleman Records under the name Tim Kinsellas. This alteration of his name continued a long-standing tradition of misdirection and obtuse playfulness that has run throughout his career. For example, Joan of Arc's album Live in Chicago, 1999 is actually a studio album whose misleading title refers to the fact that the bandmembers lived in Chicago in 1999. In 2007, the same year he released the abstract field recording collection Field Recordings of Dreams, Kinsella made his directorial debut with the feature film Orchard Vale. A few years later, he published his first novel, The Karaoke Singer's Guide to Self-Defense. Musically, he continued to record under the Joan of Arc banner while also working on collaborations like his 2013 adaptation of Chicago poet Marvin Tate's work with Angel Olsen and LeRoy Bach. He published his second novel, Let Go and Go On and On, in 2014, and the following year he served as artist-in-residence for the indie label Joyful Noise, resulting in a year-long body of work that was collected in box set form. Additional limited-release EPs and singles followed over the next few years, and in 2020, Kinsella retired the Joan of Arc project. His next musical phase was a duo collaboration with his wife, musician/artist Jenny Pulse. Together they began making experimental art-pop records like Gimme Altamont and 2023's Giddy Skelter.
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