Dominique Leone
Dominique Leone (Strømland Records)

Dominique Leone is the first artist on Strømland Records, the new record label run by Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Smalltown Supersound founder Joakim Haugland.

Dominique Leone wears many hats, only a few faces and has a hundred songs that you haven’t heard. In fact, but for his bestest buddies and the fine folks of Strømland Records, very few people have heard more than a peep from him. And yes, he´s a him. If you read Internet record reviews, you may have seen his name around, though if you hate record reviewers, please don’t hold that against him. The truth is, he’s a songwriter, producer, singer, lover, fighter… scratch that, he´s one of a growing number of college-educated musical auteurs with more than a slight command of pop history and theory chops, and writing songs for joyous, infatuated people. Perhaps some of them are a bit over stimulated. Perhaps some of them just like good melodies and strange chord progressions that still seem vaguely familiar.

Dominique is a ”classically trained” musician from Texas who currently operates out of San Francisco. He lists Brian Wilson, Claude Debussy, Andy Partridge, Randy Newman, Glenn Gould, ABBA, Miles Davis, Olivier Messiaen, and Magma’s Christian Vander as personal heroes. He thinks visual artist Julie Mehretu is the bomb.

All of his music could be considered ”pop” of a sort, though parts have a definite proggy edge. Lindstrøm recently used Dominique’s ballad ”Conversational” on the recent LateNightTales compilation [Azuli; 2007], also featuring Todd Rundgren, old school art-disco provocateurs Gina X Performance and Norwegian one-man prog-pop show Alf Emil Eik, which gives a pretty good indication of the kind of space Dominique´s music inhabits -- but then again, a recent interviewer compared it to Harry Nilsson. The music is catchy but ambitious; crafted but not sterile; interesting but not pretentious. It’s just a lot of fucking fun.

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