Mark Guiliana Official Website | Mark Guiliana on Facebook | Mark Guiliana on Twitter | Mark Guiliana on Instagram | Mark Giuliana on Soundcloud

Mark Guiliana has become recognized as one of the world’s leading drummers, admired and in demand across the spectrum from jazz to rock to electronic music for his rhythmic sophistication, creative impulse, and individual sound. He has been in the vanguard of drummers creating a new vernacular on the instrument, blending virtuosity on acoustic drums with artfully deployed electronic beats and processing. With Beat Music ‘” Guiliana’s electric band featuring a number of varied guests, hard-edged grooves and synthetic-organic fusions blend with filmic atmospherics and vocals, all driven by Guiliana’s sonic ingenuity and percussive virtuosity. In the Spring of 2019 Motema Music is slated to release the next Beat Music record. ‘Electronic music is a huge inspiration for me,’ he explains. ‘The first time I heard Squarepusher’s Feed Me Weird Things, it hit me like the first time I heard Tony Williams with Miles. Then hearing Aphex Twin was like hearing Elvin Jones with Coltrane. Experiencing that electronic music ‘” its precision, discipline, timbral imagination ‘” was just as profound for me as hearing those jazz drumming icons. So, marrying the discipline of electronic music with the improvisational sense of jazz is a lot of what the Beat Music is about.’ All About Jazz calls him ‘a beat poet of another sort… one of the few drummers who can creatively straddle and blur the electro-acoustic dividing line.’ One thing is for sure ‘” over the last decade, Mark Guiliana has become ‘one of the most influential drummers of his generation’ (JazzTimes).

Nate Wood Official Website | Nate Wood on Facebook | Nate Wood on Twitter

“I’m an introvert,” insists Nate Wood. “I actually get more energy from myself than with others. I can work days on end by myself and stay motivated.”

The acclaimed multi-instrumentalist (who, despite his protestations, is actually quite affable) is no stranger to working with other musicians — throughout his storied career, Wood has recorded or performed with the likes of Wayne Krantz, Tigran Hamasyan, The Calling, Donny McCaslin, Chaka Khan and Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders. He’s also a core member of the Grammy-nominated jazz collective Kneebody and a sought-after studio engineer.

But his new project, fOUR, is truly an ambitious take on going solo. Here, Wood is playing everything — analog synths, drums and bass, while sometimes adding vocals — at the same time. As well,  he’s recording every song in one pass with no overdubs, click track or pre-recorded backing tracks. “That’s why it’s called fOUR, because it’s me with four limbs playing four instruments at once,” says Wood.

Musically, fOUR veers from complex, space-y prog rock to electronic-tinged instrumentals. The project certainly touches upon all aspects of Wood’s career (jazz, improv, rock, singer-songwriter) and influences (long-time favorite Aphex Twin in particular).

While Wood has recorded three singer-songwriter albums under his own name where he’s played all the instruments, as well as played multiple instruments on stage at once for other projects, fOUR is the first time he’s brought those concepts together. “I wanted to keep this separate from everything else I do,” he says. “The records under my own name are a certain kind of guitar-based composition, with overdubs and layering, and I perform those live with a full band.”

fOUR operates under a different philosophy. Says Wood: “Technology now is so amazing, you can make a perfectly edited record on an iPhone. So I wanted to strip away all the tools and crutches of modern music, get rid of laptops and keep it raw. I think it makes for a richer experience in the long run.”

Lyrically, fOUR finds Wood disaffected by the current political climate and pondering the technology of today and tomorrow — twice, he muses on the idea of cryo-freezing (including one from a rabbit’s point of view, its genesis an actual news story). Elsewhere, he ponders building a ship to leave Earth. “This is certainly a different perspective,” he says. “My songs here are less about myself and more tech based.”

Currently, fOUR has released a number of viral videos on YouTube and Facebook (where some of the clips have topped one million views), with a full album of music on its way in July. As well, Wood’s ambitious one-man project has already debuted live, with several more dates to follow.

“I want to tour a lot and hopefully make fOUR my main project,” says Wood, before ending with the year’s biggest understatement. “I certainly don’t want to limit myself musically.”