HALF HOME
PRIVATE PRESS KIT
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BIO
Dylan Hunter Chee Greene is an Asian American electronic jazz musician and from the Pacific Northwest. He focuses on color, noise, and rhythm while drawing on a wide and deep global lineage informing the 100 year old sounds of his choice, the drumkit. Chee's diaspora-jazz sound and gritty production is driving with a cinematic touch, just like some of his chief inspirations such as Makaya McCraven, Perrin Moss, Nate Smith, Ashley Henry, and Stravinsky. With a background in western classical music, Dylan is young and formidable, exploring perception and memory while drawing on Eastern philosophy. After composing for award winning films, performing with elders such as Shazad Ismaily, Maryam Saleh, and Isaac Hernandez, and accompanying world class dancers in NYC, he debuts his solo project "Half Home" in 2023.
ABOUT
Half Home is the debut album from drummer turned producer, Dylan Hunter Chee Greene. About an altered sensation of origin, Half Home is one of many stories from the space between two cultures. Such a space can be imagined as an island full of relationships. While on the island, you encounter those who were born elsewhere and who live else where and yet they intersect at a crossroads here. While you can’t fully call this island home it can start to feel like the space you claim to belong to and come from - an environmental blending. And while you may need to wade off into the ocean, or to other lands, to deal with issues akin only to your particular origins, this island remains a space you can always visit.
The sound of Half Home is that of gritty synthetic sounds rendered into current diasporic jazz approach. Recorded between Berlin, Beirut, and Santo Domingo, and yet infused with influences like Teebs, Hiatus Kaiyote, Shigeto, Mark Giuliana, Flying Lotus, and Bonobo, the album expresses color palettes and flavors that fuse together genres such as progressive meter Jazz, beat maker symphonies, ancient Rajasthan influenced trance, song-form house, and boom bap. With a taoist like balance, Dylan Hunter Chee Greene flexes inspiration though his production from the music he has been blessed to learn: Western Symphonic Percussion, Ashanti Drumming of Ghana, Traditional Dominican rhythms, Arabic Classical music, and more.
Somewhere between the old school piano-only composing approach, and the beat maker mixology of today, Half Home features rising vocalists such as Dumama, Allysa Grace, and Henry the Poet. The allbum’s themes resemble mutually shared experiences about this half way home, island like space; feelings not so easily expressed about the home you were given and didn’t choose. “Holy lucid but confusing, I don’t even want your love cuz I don’t know what I’m losing…I ask my mama for salvation, she won’t ever deny it”, The Poet waxes under a Gaslit Moon. Grace expresses that admissions of lacking trust can fraughtly swirl together with Lynch-ian kinds of love on Twenty Seven Reflections, “up from the table, thought it was fabled, scream that you love me, I guess that I’m lucky”. But you debate the nonbelonging, “…would you rather suffer in silence?...I’m running away, running away from it, this placelessness”. Dumama boldly shares on Placelessness.
Half Home merely hints the troubled relationships with which we all survive to strive thorough - the mother with the brain injury, the friend with schizophrenia, the father with ptsd - and rather in broad strokes, these songs paint the emotions of those island relationships were sustain and we search for home.
CREDITS
01 Psyche
Saxophone, Flute, Clarinet by Pachakuti
E bass by Paul Hoyle Gutierrez
Drums, Synths, Dylan Hunter Chee Greene
02 Oiled Waters of the Family ft. Pachakuti
Saxophone, Flute, Clarinet by Pachakuti
Vocals by Myssa Jallad
Drums, Piano, Synths by Dylan Hunter Chee Greene
Additional Composition by Marius Maxamillion Dich
03 This Placelessness ft. Dumama
Vocals by Gugulethu ‘Dumama’ Duma
Piano, Synths, Cymbals, Percussion by Dylan Hunter Chee Greene
04 Gaslit Moon ft. Henry the Poet
Vocals by Henry the Poet
Drums, Synths, Gongs by Dylan Hunter Chee Greene
05 Twenty Seven Reflections ft. Allysa Grace
Voice, Violin by Allysa Grace Martinez
Samples by Mom
Drums, Synths, Voice, Rhodes by Dylan Hunter Chee Greene
06 Reflections: Detroit from Beirut
Voice by Allysa Grace Martinez
Drums, Percussion, Synths, Rhodes by Dylan Hunter Chee Greene
07 Bump Out
Samples by Grandma, Mom
Drums, Synths by Dylan Hunter Chee Greene
Production and Composition by Dylan Hunter Chee Greene
