Modern rock, synth-pop flavor new songs from Dayton musician Kevin Brown

Credit: CONTRIBUTED

Credit: CONTRIBUTED

After playing strictly in cover bands for several years, Kevin Brown returned to writing and recording his own material in 2018. He dove even deeper into his original music during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and recently emerged with new EPs from two very different projects: Wicked Mr. and SiL-O-ET.

“I’ve been busy doing original music for the past few years,” Brown said. “It’s been fun. I don’t want to say I’m done being in cover bands but it was finally time for me to focus on my own songs.”

Wicked Mr. is a modern rock collaboration with TJ Hartmann, formerly of Needmore.

“TJ and I started creating some cool stuff and we never stopped,” Brown said. “We never did anything with it because we were just writing and creating. For the past year-and-a-half, we’ve basically been trimming the fat and trying to figure out what songs we want to showcase. Now, we thought it was finally time to get focused and release something. We’ve got a cool EP with four killer songs. We’re going to get some video content out and start exposing this stuff we’ve been creating.”

SiL-O-ET is a beat-driven synth-pop project.

“I started collaborating on music virtually with Martyn Fanko, who is British,” Brown said. “He’s an audiophile and he’s been a buddy of mine for over 12 years. We worked in high end audio-video together and he has a knack for music. We were talking in 2020 and we decided to start sending each other music. We started messing around and that grew into the SiL-O-ET project. We’ve been working on these really cool, funky electronic songs. It’s very much like Jamiroquai and Beck, kind of a very cheeky sound.”

Early in the pandemic, Brown began assembling a home studio and learning digital audio recording.

“If I wanted to do this on my own, I had to learn how to do it,” he said. “I got the gear and started figuring things out. It was a huge learning curve but it worked out well. The SiL-O-ET stuff sounds so different from what I’ve been doing with TJ. I love being able to showcase the versatility of what I can do and the musicianship I’m working with. I always planned to release both EPs around the same time, but I didn’t want to combine them and try to make one super band. Each one has its own identity. They’re so different so it’s not like I’m trampling over anything.”

More info: www.wkdmr.com.

Contact this contributing writer at 937-287-6139 or e-mail at donthrasher100@gmail.com.

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