About
Bio
Formed beneath the merciless neon lights of Las Vegas, Nevada, Red State Soundsystem is the nom de musique of multi-instrumentalist, writer and futurist Joshua Ellis.
Though RSS has only released one album — the recent Ghosts In A Burning City — Ellis has been writing songs and playing since the age of fourteen. "My mother was a singer-songwriter who married her keyboard player," Ellis says, "My grandmother and great-grandmother were both concert pianists. It would be surprising if I didn't make music in some way."
A dual love of music and technology served Ellis well when he became a professional journalist, writing for publications like the legendary cyberculture journal Mondo 2000. "I dropped out of art school in San Francisco to write, basically. I wanted to be a special effects guy doing 3D graphics, but writing was immediate -I could go out and interview some band I loved and pay my rent doing it. And I was sort of crap at doing CG anyway."
After a few years of bouncing around the West Coast, Ellis ended up in Las Vegas. "I was living in LA trying to be a screenwriter, and it was just horrible. My parents lived in Vegas, and like everybody else who comes to Vegas I thought I'd come here for six months, make some money, and head back to LA. That was Christmas of 1998," he laughs.
He soon got a gig writing a regular column for the Las Vegas CityLife alternative weekly newspaper, a job which won him several Nevada Press Association awards. He also collaborated with co-writer Matt O'Brien on a series of stories about the homeless who live in the storm drains underneath Las Vegas, which O'Brien later expanded into a book and which were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
During this time, Ellis was writing songs, hosting coffeeshop open mikes and teaching himself the ins and outs of digital music production. "I started with really primitive equipment, a Pentium II desktop computer running old tracker software. But I had this sense that I could do far more interesting things musically with a computer than I could with just an acoustic guitar."
In 2003, Ellis co-founded the online indie music store Mperia.com, which allowed artists to sell their work directly to fans on the Net and keep the majority of the profits. But the site was ahead of its time, and closed up shop in 2006 when its parent company went out of business. Ellis spent the next three years recording Ghosts In A Burning City in a variety of locations, from his Las Vegas bedroom to hotels in Berlin and Istanbul. The album reflects not only Ellis's love of songwriting heroes like Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Lou Reed, but also his love of dubstep, trip-hop, ambient and Afrobeat. "I think I got my love of great lyricists from my mom," he says. "But I also love experimentalism, algorithmic music. I'm a Brian Eno fanatic. And I love heavy rhythmic stuff, Massive Attack and Burial and Trentemoller and African funk like Fela Kuti. I wanted to mix up everything I love — Tom Waits and William Gibson and mutated drum beats and songs about globalism and bad love affairs and being afraid of never doing anything important with your life."
And the name Red State Soundsystem? "I wanted something to hide behind, honestly. I like the idea of relative anonymity, and the ability to work with other people and have a sort of blanket identity to use. Plus I dig that romantic idea of Jamaican and African soundsystems, dudes on flatbed trucks with generators making dub music in a shanty town. I wanted to make a sort of middle-American version of that."
Early reviews for Ghosts In A Burning City are favorable. "Ghosts in a Burning City seethes with the awareness that the 21st century will be just as full of beauty and horror as the previous 100 years," says the East Bay Express. "As the West's happy facade falls, Ghosts is the proper soundtrack."
And the future of Red State Soundsystem? "I'm already working on the next album," Ellis says, "which is probably going to be more of a collaborative affair." He's also done remixes for bands like Chicago's Loyal Divide and Vegas's Big Friendly Corporation, and he'd like to get into producing. While Ellis's songs may be ambiguous about humanity's role in the new century, Red State Soundsystem's future looks bright.
