歌手资料
Trent Miller
英文名：
性别：男
国籍：
出生地：
流派：
生日：
星座：
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简介：
Italian by birth but now residing in London, Trent Miller has been described as the Pete Doherty of the Americana movement. However, with his wistful acid-bite lyrics, mournful, chilling melodies and outlaw, renegade posture, a more suitable comparison might be to that of Gram Parsons or Gene Clark.\nHis original mix of gothic and avant-country has seen the singer-songwriter gain a growing cult following in the underground folk scene since he first brought his music to London in late 2006.\nTrent Miller’s debut album ‘Cerberus’ was released in 2009 on his own Hangman Records label and contained fourteen self composed songs performed by Trent alone, just guitar, harmonica and voice and gained wide acclaim for his brand of gothic inspired country.\nThe record is a one way journey on a railroad heading straight to Hell, an opiate-induced nightmare populated with junkies, hopeless losers and demons that has been described as ‘music for dancing on a grave’.\nFollowing on from his self-released debut album – which received substantial press coverage and airplay, including Cerys Matthews on BBC 6 Music - Trent Miller returned with his second collection of arresting country-folk, ‘Welcome To Inferno Valley’, in 2011.\nThis was the first full-length album release on the re-invigorated ‘Bucketfull Of Brains’ label. Directly affiliated to the legendary magazine - 32 years publishing and still thriving – the first UK champions of the Paisley Underground and REM – as adept as ever at unearthing and supporting maverick talents.\nUnlike his debut, ‘Inferno Valley’ is very much a band album, comprising songs road-tested and honed at literally dozens of gigs around the London area and throughout Miller’s Italian homeland with his band The Skeleton Jive. The record is strongly influenced by legendary 80s performers like Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club and Guy Kyser of Thin White Rope (he contributed a version of ‘Timing’ to the TWR tribute album Hidden Desert), while ‘Fear Of Flyin’’, one of the album’s highlights, pays tribute to another hero, Gene Clark.\nAgain, the album was favorably received by the press - Q Magazine described it as a 'darkly underground mix of hangovers, anguished love, mournful blues and lonesome country’ and for Daily Mirror ‘fans of Gene Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark will recognize a kindred spirit in his glowering meditations and steely worldview’.\nFollowing the success of ‘Welcome to Inferno Valley’, Miller’s label Bucketfull Of Brains decided to reissue his debut album ‘Cerberus’ in 2012.\nTrent and his new band are currently working on a new album. The record is due to be released by the end of 2013.\nINTERVIEW ON BLOW UP (by Roberto Curti)\n‘I was born in a small town, one of those jungles of cement, grey skies... where time seems to be crawling. Long afternoons sipping beer from a can and the anguish of a future that looms, a 9 to 5 job you hate, a mortgage that slowly sucks the life out of you. But like Lou Reed said: ‘There’s a good thing in growing up in a small town. You want to get out of it’.\nThe story of the man that today calls himself Trent Miller is, like many other stories in rock, the story of an epiphany. Only the scenery is not Duluth or Asbury Park, but Casale Monferrato.\n‘I was 18 years old and a friend was doing his civil service in a centre and they asked him to empty a warehouse. Since half 80s, the place had been subscribed to all the main Italian music magazines, ‘Il Mucchio’, ‘Rockerilla’, ‘Blow Up’, ‘Rumore’, and they wanted to get rid of all those boxes. I offered to take care of them but instead I brought them to my house. I spent the following months reading all those old mags, discovering bands I had never heard of before. To me, ‘written music’ have always had a special appeal, the music described on paper. Gun Club, Thin White Rope, the Paisley Underground’.\n‘In one of those magazines, in the ‘demos reviews section’, I discovered an artists who lived in my town. I contacted him via email and we started collaborating’.\nThe man was The Finger aka Franco Di Terlizi, the mind behind a lo-fi project recorded between the four walls of a bedroom with vintage equipment (the beautiful ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’, released by Snowdonia in 2004 - a mix between Sparlkehorse, Grandaddy and Mark Kozelek - has been reviewed on Blow Up issue #69).\n‘Franco was ten years older than I and he’s been my mentor. He taught me basically everything I know about how to record an album, he had a vast collection of vinyls of bands I only read of and I literally consumed them (I remember that he had to hide Gun Club’s ‘Miami’ since the track ‘Mother Of Heart’ was consumed to be point of being barely listenable). For the next three years we spent every weekend in his home made studio, recording two albums under the name ‘Last Chance Motel’ that we published only on cd roms’.\nHowever, the frustration for the chronic inability to perform live in Italy was growing. ‘I remember I watched Scorsese’s ‘No Direction Home’ at the cinema and for weeks I crossed Italy on train, me and my guitar, looking for places to play in exchange of a meal and a place to sleep...long days that often ended sleeping on a bench in the park, or begging in the streets to raise the money to buy something to eat, under the constant threat of the Police, which seems to remember well its Fascist heritage and is against every form of street art or free expression in Italy. I had never been in London and had no idea of what was waiting for me, but when I got into that plane and decided to leave everything behind, I had no regrets whatsoever’.\nThe first impact with London was traumatic. ‘I lived for the first couple of months in a hostel sharing my bedroom with five other people. The people who ran the place were members of the Roman fascist group ‘Forza Nuova’, which is behind a shitty fascist association called ‘Easy London’. The rent was very low but the place was full of criminals, it wasn’t unusual to get back and find your room completely emptied, not even a pair of dirty socks left. I wasn’t very worried about that since my only belongings were a guitar with which I slept and Syd Barrett’s biography, and I strongly doubted that anyone there was interest in the 60s psychedelia...’.\nTo survive he started a series of several jobs, most of them in the night: guardian of warehouses, shifts in a recycling centre, porter in cheap, dirty hotels populated with absurd characters, the people of London’s night. Writing songs and performing live, mostly in the ‘Open Mic Nights’.\n‘You show up with a guitar, sign your name on a list and wait for your turn. Sometimes two, three hours to play a couple songs, and everything is made even worst by the fact that there is not quality control at all, which sometimes means hours spent under the torture of terrible music. I became part of a sort of itinerant show managed by a real motherf**ker, an Irishman who seemed to incarnate all that is rotten in music, and from whom I learned the first rules to survive in this dirty business’.\n‘ That’s also where I first met Dan Raza. Dan is the first artist I’ve ever seen that made me want to lock myself in my bedroom for hours on end to work on my songwriting. Imagine a young Steve Earle like you see him in ‘Heartworm Highway’...Dan is still trying to find the right studio sound he is looking for and for the moment there is only an ep and a live out under his name. One of those artists that can’t compromise his Art with the rules of showbiz... and one of the best songwriters of this generation’.\nTrent, Dan Raza and others are all part of the growing London’s folk scene, a circle of musicians performing at Betsey Trotwood, home of Trevor Moss & Hanna Lou’s ‘Lantern Society’, and Andy Allen Hankdog’s ‘The Easycome’ in South London.\nThe one to give the scene exposure and the focal point of the movement was a young guy from Sweden, Benjamin Thomas. ‘At the time, the folk scene in London was little more than some scattered shows with little or no audience, very different to what we built in these years. Benjamin arrived like a comet and I immediately realized that things were going to change. Imagine a young Dylan, a perfect mix between talent and an innate ability to deal with all the rules of music business. The first one to bring 50 or more people to his shows, to fill whole venues. The one who made me realize that it was necessary a project, a plan to change the things and that people, an audience was not only important but essential to realize it’.\nMeanwhile, Trent was working on his debut album, ‘Cerberus’, recorded on an 8 tracks Tascam and published in 1000 copies for his own label ‘Hangman Records’.\n‘CERBERUS is a desperate album. All those hours spent working in the night in total loneliness, the lack of human contact, the feelings of alienation of living in a big city with only your dreams to hang on to...all that went into the album’. The title and the image on the front cover (a painting of Gustav Dore’s) come from Dante’s ‘Inferno’ and the logo of the label is The Hangman Tarot.\n‘Cerberus is the three headed dog that guards the gates of Hell’s third circle of the damned. I’ve always found Dante’s Inferno fascinating for its symbolisms, I’ve always been interested in Tarots and black magic, and the Hangman’s Tarot has a particular meaning for me. The album was recorded in total loneliness, I overdubbed percussions and all the rest on my own. The final result comes from two sessions. A 10 tracks demo I recorded at ‘Randomcolours’ studio in North London and another 20 songs I recorded in my bedroom with a digital 8 tracks. There are several versions of Cerberus in cd roms scattered around London, but for the final version of 14 tracks I choose songs from both sessions and remixed the whole album entirely to give it a sense of cohesion and purpose. The idea was to approach the songs like if they were Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Gothic Country, that’s the way I started to call it...’\nThe English press started taking notice, glowing reviews and the tag of ‘Pete Doherty of the Americana Movement’ which understandably Trent welcomed with a certain amount of embarrassment. A better description has perhaps been given by Nick West of Bucketfull of Brains, who talked about ‘myths, magik and Mississipi’.\nWe reviewed ‘Cerberus’ in the last issue of Blow Up. Ballads stripped to the bone, country folk inspired by legends like Dylan, Cohen, Gram Parson and Gene Clark – but that also betrays a love for more underground bands like Gun Club, Death In June and Thin White Rope (Trent recorded a cover of TWR’s Timing for the international project ‘Hidden Desert’).\nStrong images, cut with the skills of an experienced songwriter. A dark atmosphere that soaks your skin and sticks to the bones and a voice that sometimes sounds like a Guy Kyser reborn in the mists of North Italy’s plains. A debut that surprises for the confidence and quality of the songwriting, gloomy and fascinating: being able to see the stars again after these 14 tracks, we are left waiting impatiently for the follow up, almost ready and due to be released by the end of the year - ‘Welcome To Inferno Valley’. Leave every hope behind...
Italian by birth but now residing in London, Trent Miller has been described as the Pete Doherty of the Americana movement. However, with his wistful acid-bite lyrics, mournful, chilling melodies and outlaw, renegade posture, a more suitable comparison might be to that of Gram Parsons or Gene Clark.\nHis original mix of gothic and avant-country has seen the singer-songwriter gain a growing cult following in the underground folk scene since he first brought his music to London in late 2006.\nTrent Miller’s debut album ‘Cerberus’ was released in 2009 on his own Hangman Records label and contained fourteen self composed songs performed by Trent alone, just guitar, harmonica and voice and gained wide acclaim for his brand of gothic inspired country.\nThe record is a one way journey on a railroad heading straight to Hell, an opiate-induced nightmare populated with junkies, hopeless losers and demons that has been described as ‘music for dancing on a grave’.\nFollowing on from his self-released debut album – which received substantial press coverage and airplay, including Cerys Matthews on BBC 6 Music - Trent Miller returned with his second collection of arresting country-folk, ‘Welcome To Inferno Valley’, in 2011.\nThis was the first full-length album release on the re-invigorated ‘Bucketfull Of Brains’ label. Directly affiliated to the legendary magazine - 32 years publishing and still thriving – the first UK champions of the Paisley Underground and REM – as adept as ever at unearthing and supporting maverick talents.\nUnlike his debut, ‘Inferno Valley’ is very much a band album, comprising songs road-tested and honed at literally dozens of gigs around the London area and throughout Miller’s Italian homeland with his band The Skeleton Jive. The record is strongly influenced by legendary 80s performers like Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club and Guy Kyser of Thin White Rope (he contributed a version of ‘Timing’ to the TWR tribute album Hidden Desert), while ‘Fear Of Flyin’’, one of the album’s highlights, pays tribute to another hero, Gene Clark.\nAgain, the album was favorably received by the press - Q Magazine described it as a 'darkly underground mix of hangovers, anguished love, mournful blues and lonesome country’ and for Daily Mirror ‘fans of Gene Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark will recognize a kindred spirit in his glowering meditations and steely worldview’.\nFollowing the success of ‘Welcome to Inferno Valley’, Miller’s label Bucketfull Of Brains decided to reissue his debut album ‘Cerberus’ in 2012.\nTrent and his new band are currently working on a new album. The record is due to be released by the end of 2013.\nINTERVIEW ON BLOW UP (by Roberto Curti)\n‘I was born in a small town, one of those jungles of cement, grey skies... where time seems to be crawling. Long afternoons sipping beer from a can and the anguish of a future that looms, a 9 to 5 job you hate, a mortgage that slowly sucks the life out of you. But like Lou Reed said: ‘There’s a good thing in growing up in a small town. You want to get out of it’.\nThe story of the man that today calls himself Trent Miller is, like many other stories in rock, the story of an epiphany. Only the scenery is not Duluth or Asbury Park, but Casale Monferrato.\n‘I was 18 years old and a friend was doing his civil service in a centre and they asked him to empty a warehouse. Since half 80s, the place had been subscribed to all the main Italian music magazines, ‘Il Mucchio’, ‘Rockerilla’, ‘Blow Up’, ‘Rumore’, and they wanted to get rid of all those boxes. I offered to take care of them but instead I brought them to my house. I spent the following months reading all those old mags, discovering bands I had never heard of before. To me, ‘written music’ have always had a special appeal, the music described on paper. Gun Club, Thin White Rope, the Paisley Underground’.\n‘In one of those magazines, in the ‘demos reviews section’, I discovered an artists who lived in my town. I contacted him via email and we started collaborating’.\nThe man was The Finger aka Franco Di Terlizi, the mind behind a lo-fi project recorded between the four walls of a bedroom with vintage equipment (the beautiful ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’, released by Snowdonia in 2004 - a mix between Sparlkehorse, Grandaddy and Mark Kozelek - has been reviewed on Blow Up issue #69).\n‘Franco was ten years older than I and he’s been my mentor. He taught me basically everything I know about how to record an album, he had a vast collection of vinyls of bands I only read of and I literally consumed them (I remember that he had to hide Gun Club’s ‘Miami’ since the track ‘Mother Of Heart’ was consumed to be point of being barely listenable). For the next three years we spent every weekend in his home made studio, recording two albums under the name ‘Last Chance Motel’ that we published only on cd roms’.\nHowever, the frustration for the chronic inability to perform live in Italy was growing. ‘I remember I watched Scorsese’s ‘No Direction Home’ at the cinema and for weeks I crossed Italy on train, me and my guitar, looking for places to play in exchange of a meal and a place to sleep...long days that often ended sleeping on a bench in the park, or begging in the streets to raise the money to buy something to eat, under the constant threat of the Police, which seems to remember well its Fascist heritage and is against every form of street art or free expression in Italy. I had never been in London and had no idea of what was waiting for me, but when I got into that plane and decided to leave everything behind, I had no regrets whatsoever’.\nThe first impact with London was traumatic. ‘I lived for the first couple of months in a hostel sharing my bedroom with five other people. The people who ran the place were members of the Roman fascist group ‘Forza Nuova’, which is behind a shitty fascist association called ‘Easy London’. The rent was very low but the place was full of criminals, it wasn’t unusual to get back and find your room completely emptied, not even a pair of dirty socks left. I wasn’t very worried about that since my only belongings were a guitar with which I slept and Syd Barrett’s biography, and I strongly doubted that anyone there was interest in the 60s psychedelia...’.\nTo survive he started a series of several jobs, most of them in the night: guardian of warehouses, shifts in a recycling centre, porter in cheap, dirty hotels populated with absurd characters, the people of London’s night. Writing songs and performing live, mostly in the ‘Open Mic Nights’.\n‘You show up with a guitar, sign your name on a list and wait for your turn. Sometimes two, three hours to play a couple songs, and everything is made even worst by the fact that there is not quality control at all, which sometimes means hours spent under the torture of terrible music. I became part of a sort of itinerant show managed by a real motherf**ker, an Irishman who seemed to incarnate all that is rotten in music, and from whom I learned the first rules to survive in this dirty business’.\n‘ That’s also where I first met Dan Raza. Dan is the first artist I’ve ever seen that made me want to lock myself in my bedroom for hours on end to work on my songwriting. Imagine a young Steve Earle like you see him in ‘Heartworm Highway’...Dan is still trying to find the right studio sound he is looking for and for the moment there is only an ep and a live out under his name. One of those artists that can’t compromise his Art with the rules of showbiz... and one of the best songwriters of this generation’.\nTrent, Dan Raza and others are all part of the growing London’s folk scene, a circle of musicians performing at Betsey Trotwood, home of Trevor Moss & Hanna Lou’s ‘Lantern Society’, and Andy Allen Hankdog’s ‘The Easycome’ in South London.\nThe one to give the scene exposure and the focal point of the movement was a young guy from Sweden, Benjamin Thomas. ‘At the time, the folk scene in London was little more than some scattered shows with little or no audience, very different to what we built in these years. Benjamin arrived like a comet and I immediately realized that things were going to change. Imagine a young Dylan, a perfect mix between talent and an innate ability to deal with all the rules of music business. The first one to bring 50 or more people to his shows, to fill whole venues. The one who made me realize that it was necessary a project, a plan to change the things and that people, an audience was not only important but essential to realize it’.\nMeanwhile, Trent was working on his debut album, ‘Cerberus’, recorded on an 8 tracks Tascam and published in 1000 copies for his own label ‘Hangman Records’.\n‘CERBERUS is a desperate album. All those hours spent working in the night in total loneliness, the lack of human contact, the feelings of alienation of living in a big city with only your dreams to hang on to...all that went into the album’. The title and the image on the front cover (a painting of Gustav Dore’s) come from Dante’s ‘Inferno’ and the logo of the label is The Hangman Tarot.\n‘Cerberus is the three headed dog that guards the gates of Hell’s third circle of the damned. I’ve always found Dante’s Inferno fascinating for its symbolisms, I’ve always been interested in Tarots and black magic, and the Hangman’s Tarot has a particular meaning for me. The album was recorded in total loneliness, I overdubbed percussions and all the rest on my own. The final result comes from two sessions. A 10 tracks demo I recorded at ‘Randomcolours’ studio in North London and another 20 songs I recorded in my bedroom with a digital 8 tracks. There are several versions of Cerberus in cd roms scattered around London, but for the final version of 14 tracks I choose songs from both sessions and remixed the whole album entirely to give it a sense of cohesion and purpose. The idea was to approach the songs like if they were Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Gothic Country, that’s the way I started to call it...’\nThe English press started taking notice, glowing reviews and the tag of ‘Pete Doherty of the Americana Movement’ which understandably Trent welcomed with a certain amount of embarrassment. A better description has perhaps been given by Nick West of Bucketfull of Brains, who talked about ‘myths, magik and Mississipi’.\nWe reviewed ‘Cerberus’ in the last issue of Blow Up. Ballads stripped to the bone, country folk inspired by legends like Dylan, Cohen, Gram Parson and Gene Clark – but that also betrays a love for more underground bands like Gun Club, Death In June and Thin White Rope (Trent recorded a cover of TWR’s Timing for the international project ‘Hidden Desert’).\nStrong images, cut with the skills of an experienced songwriter. A dark atmosphere that soaks your skin and sticks to the bones and a voice that sometimes sounds like a Guy Kyser reborn in the mists of North Italy’s plains. A debut that surprises for the confidence and quality of the songwriting, gloomy and fascinating: being able to see the stars again after these 14 tracks, we are left waiting impatiently for the follow up, almost ready and due to be released by the end of the year - ‘Welcome To Inferno Valley’. Leave every hope behind...
