Sergius Gregory Making Quiet Music in Homer, Alaska

Sergius Gregory has taken the musician-in-a-cabin experiment leaps farther than the likes of Bon Iver. After living in Hawaii, Oregon, New York, and Pennsylvania, he has spent the last few years in Homer, Alaska, holing away in the winters in his own cabin with an 8-track and a handful of instruments. And, finding Homer to be growing too rapidly, with people migrating from Anchorage and building big new houses, he is planning to move across the water to a smaller town that can only be reached by plane.

Sergius' songs are rich with experience, despite the fact that he spends his winters alone. He has spent the past few summers traveling across Eastern Europe, shooting pictures and playing shows across Romania - picking up musicians to play with as he goes, and gathering material that he saves for the period of creation when he returns to Alaska. He refers to this as "molting," a recurring theme of the ten new songs he is just finishing up and preparing to release as an album.

Seeing as Sergius' music has never properly been released, other than his own generous file sharing on sites like GarageBand and BETA, it is good news that his new songs are not a far cry from what he has produced in the past. Though, as he explains, he has better microphones now that pick up his voice more clearly, and a superior 8-track recorder. He describes the new songs as "emotionally intense," and he is just putting the final touches on the last three songs.

I find myself constantly returning to his MySpace page and searching the internet for old demos that he has strewn about for people to download. The music is immediate, however much reverb encases it. His voice sounds like felt on piano keys, so careful and soft. He deprecates himself gently and celebrates his solitude. His melodies are like something Morrissey would've written, but all out of focus. I want to hear this music over and over, and I want everyone else to get to hear it. Listen.