Oh hey, my name is Levi.

Summer Seventeen EP

I played drums on my first studio recording a couple of months ago. I've been in a handful of bands over the years and have played guitar and bass on studio records, but this was a totally new (slightly stressful) experience for me. We booked a Saturday back in September at Russian Recording and it ended up being such a great experience. Our goal was to get three songs recorded in one day, but we ended up finishing six! Here's the result:

I've mostly played with the same group of people for a while. A few years ago, our drummer decided he was no longer able to commit the time to rehearsing or playing shows. I've always like messing around on a drum set so I volunteered to quit playing guitar and become the drummer. This made more sense than looking for another person who's schedule we'd have to try and make work. We used the band money we had saved up to buy a cheap drum set and I started learning how to play.

Life can get pretty hectic with having kids, starting businesses, and changing jobs. Three years later, it's just me and my friend Alan left from the original band of four. We've mostly scrapped all the old songs we wrote during the first few years of me learning how to play drums. After a four month break at the beginning of 2017 we started rehearsing again as a two-piece. By the end of the summer we came away with an EP's worth of material and then some.

Two version of a logo that looks like an ampersand with a snake's head

Our current set up is just vocals, a baritone guitar, and drums. There are lots of things I miss about a more traditional instrumentation, but I'm really enjoying how the minimal amount of instruments forces you to work harder on dynamics and phrasing. We've written about half of a new EP since recording this one. We're planing to play a few shows and then go back into the studio in the spring. I feel really positive about the new stuff we are writing and can't wait to share more.


What is next

I graduated college with a degree in industrial design at the beginning of 2004. I got my first design (unsurprisingly not in industrial design) job in 2006 designing menu screens for DVDs. It was just a few short years before the financial crisis …

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Deep Cuts

Last Friday, Febreuary 3 was the opening for my show called Deep Cuts at Blueline Gallery. It's a collection of my work from the last year or so that includes a bunch of new original artwork and prints, icluding some from my Relatives project.

I didn't get a ton of photos from the event, but here's one of the shots of the main wall I grabbed with my phone on the night. I know it's kinda blurry.

Deep cuts opening

Sketchbook video

I also made this video of the sketchbook I've kept for the last few months. There was tons of great work in here that I wanted to show, but didn't really want to rip out the pages. This video was the solution. It ran in a loop on a big monitor during the opening reception.


Family Portraits August 2016

My wife and son were out of town for the weekend visiting some family, so I got a house all to myself. I spent all of Friday night drawing and listening to records. It was so much fun and totally refreshing.

Family Portraits

My wife has been asking me to sketch some portraits of her, my son, and myself for a while and she was pretty pleased with the results. I used some new brushes and ink I had bought earlier and realized how much I like working in this loose sketchy style.


Potting Plants

My mom came down and spent the weekend with us to celebrate a belated Mother's Day. We spent some time a the local greenhouse picking out a few new house plants that we potted yesterday.

Plants paper cut out