James Ferraro

Early career and The Skaters

Ferraro comes from a musical background. His father was a musician, DJ and record collector while his mother was a singer. He began making instrumentals in high school with the program MTV Music Generator (1999). When Ferraro was 18, he moved from New York to San Diego, California, where he met Spencer Clark. He explained that "we had this conversation and it ended with us collaborating on visual art and paintings and stuff together."

When Ferraro was 20, he formed a drone noise music project with Clark called The Skaters and the two recorded music for a year under the moniker. After a year of recording, they began touring around the country and issued releases from that year of recording. Physicalities Of The Sensibilities Of Ingrediential Stairways (2008), issued on Eclipse Records, was the last record released by the Skaters.

Solo career

Ferraro states that a lot of his early solo work was for "soundtrack installations" he did in New York City. His album Roach Motel (2008), which was a part of his "trash rock" project Lamborghini Crystal, was for an installation he made using Raid insecticide: "I like this album because it was one of the most successful marriages between the installation I had at the time and the music." According to Ferraro, records of the Lamborghini Crystal moniker like Roach Moteal and Night Dolls with Hairspray (2010) regard dumb teenagers who huff aerosol. He further explained, "The idea itself was basically just private material, just fooling around. I was really inspired to try to make just weird B-movie style trash."

Ferraro's first solo album he did outside The Skaters was Multitopia (2008), recorded around the fall of 2007 in New York City and released on the label Olde English Spelling Bee. The album uses snippets of radio and television shows such as The Howard Stern Show and Access Hollywood, as well as tabloid articles about plastic surgery. The record regards the United States' cultural change into an "ADD style of consumerism" that consists of "impulsive shopping and cable TV type behavior" that Ferraro believes was caused by the events of 9/11.

Clear (2008), a series of lo-fi tape recordings tracked shortly after finishing Multitopia, is about the Nirvana state involved in the beliefs of Scientology. Learning about Scientology's "weird" media coverage and its "tabloid culture surrounding" it, Ferraro felt this was like "modern spirituality," and with Clear, he wanted to focus on a spirituality that was modern in terms of being "current, digital, and global." Ferraro said that the name of Clear describes how the tracks on the album were recorded: "It was all recorded on tape, so it was lo-fidelity. But when I was making or playing this music, it was all pristine digital New Age landscapes. So yeah, really, it was just a soundtrack to Clear – Scientology’s heaven."

Ferraro then recorded '‘Citrac’' (2008) in Florida shortly after the release of Clear. Ferraro described Citrac as "a collection of two recordings," one of them being about the end of the world with its sound palette inspired by Maurizio Bianchi's piece "Symphony For A Genocide" and the religious fiction novel series Left Behind. As Ferraro explained, "basically, I was documenting my experience in Florida. And this type of Christianity in this modern context, and how backwards it all seemed. And just being in awe of it all, and creating my own fiction from that."

Last American Hero (2010) was also made during the making of Citrac, and is based on Ferraro's experiences of when he was living in a "kind of insane gated community for senior citizens" where his grandparents resided. He recalled feeling like he was in a "weird science experiment of consumerism" in the community, which consisted of "large flat-screen TVs, and insane Ikea couches that you can’t even sit on because they’re too big", as well as Chrysler PT Cruisers. As Ferraro explained, "this infrastructure of gated communities and Wal-Marts and Targets, and these complexes of shopping – that was their entire world."

For his breakout album Far Side Virtual, Ferraro explained that his original idea had been to release its sixteen compositions as a set of downloadable ringtones, Explaining the title in an interview, Ferraro said:

Far Side Virtual mainly designates a space in society, or a mode of behaving. All of these things operating in synchronicity: like ringtones, flat-screens, theater, cuisine, fashion, sushi. I don't want to call it "virtual reality," so I call it Far Side Virtual. If you really want to understand Far Side, first off, listen to [Claude] Debussy, and secondly, go into a frozen yogurt shop. Afterwards, go into an Apple store and just fool around, hang out in there. Afterwards, go to Starbucks and get a gift card. They have a book there on the history of Starbucks—buy this book and go home. If you do all these things you'll understand what Far Side Virtual is – because people kind of live in it already.

For NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, Ferraro based how the music would be executed on the image of 9/11 and surveillance footage and how the behavior of criminals are determined only based on an image of said criminals rather than what they really did:

The thing about that, is that it was just from my raw experience of what's around me: subway stations, trash on the ground, rats, everything that was around me at that time. I accumulated the material for the album as I went on. I went into it totally blind and at the end I realized I was making a record about these things.

In August of 2017, Ferraro's multimedia art exhibition, 'Extinction Renaissance', premiered at the Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden. It was displayed from July 20th to August 26th, and included digital art using imagery from Roblox, a massively multiplayer gaming platform which Ferraro cited as 'a chamber of social compression', where in his own words, 'millions of online avatars provide digital prehension [sic] and direct links to synapses, then tortured by unlatched human instincts as they run around retrograding into resource hoarding and simulated killing in a low-bit CGI environment.' Ferraro also released a limited edition musical piece, 'Anthrospray: Music for Extinction Renaissance', on USB credit cards through the Loyal Gallery's website.

Artistry

Ferraro has created music since the mid 2000s, initially with Spencer Clark as The Skaters. His style has developed widely since, ranging from drone music, noise and sound collage music with a mystic lo-fi ethos, to new age, alternative R&B and contemporary classical with a hi-fi touch.

He is also known for uniquely dealing with modern life; for example themes of his albums range from consumerism, hyperreality, post-9/11 New York, and lo-fi counterculture. His 2011 work Far Side Virtual is often credited for helping to spark the development of the internet-based micro-genre vaporwave, although he has not considered himself a part of its history.

In a 2009 issue of The Wire, David Keenan characterized Ferraro as an progenitor of an emerging post-noise music style dubbed "hypnagogic pop", in which memory and nostalgia for retro formats (especially 1980s recording technology and culture) acted as a defining characteristic.

Red Bull Music Academy described the concept of Ferraro's albums as regarding the "dark underbelly of masculine culture in the digital age." Most of Ferraro's records take place in dystopian environments, focusing on the consequences of consumerism. According to Ferraro, the consumerism concept of his albums came from his interest in "signs" and "symbols" and the fact that they lose their identity due to "excessive repetition." His works have been compared to theories of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who stated that only "symbols" and "signs" have destroyed any sort of real meaning and that human activity is "only a simulation of reality."

The sounds Ferraro uses are those that humans encounter but are not aware of. These include television jingles, cell phone ringtones and ATM machine noises. Robert Grunenberg of Ssense characterized the sounds as "communicational tools" between humans and electronics that are "informing, warning, or pleasing" humans. He also writes that "the shelf life of electronic audio rarely surpasses that of your average milk carton. And so, his compilations become a nostalgic sound archive of the near-past." Overall, Grunenberg analyzed that concepts of Ferraro's sound palette was that "as much as we are living under the dominance of our visual culture, we are greatly affected by the powers of our audio culture as well." Ferraro symbolized the nostalgia element that comes out of these "near-past" sounds as "the decline of American prosperity, a ghost of a once-superpower that is dying."

In making an album, Ferraro says that he comes up with a "vision" or an imaginary visual picture of what it will be. He explained in a 2012 interview, "I try not to be overly conceptual about what I’m doing. You can contrive it to a point where it gets too heady. Music wise, I try to be careful."

Ferraro's work has been falsely labeled by many journalists to include samples; he has claimed in interviews that he has never used samples in any of his releases. When interviewed by Bomb magazine, he said, "I sample my own sources of sounds. I use AT&T Natural Voices and text-to-speech generators so it's all original content."

Partial discography