Quinn Walker

Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and home recording enthusiast Quinn Walker describes his music as "experimental pop," and once told a reporter, "I try to include elements of every genre in what I do 'cause there's always at least one or two incredible sounds birthed by every musical category" -- a statement that certainly suits his wildly eclectic lo-fi approach to music. Walker became interested in music as a child, beginning piano lessons when he was four years old and forming an informal band with friends, using cheap synthesizers to play songs about dogs. Walker started writing and recording songs when he was a junior in high school, using an old dictation machine as a tape deck and recruiting his friends as backing musicians; after a couple years, Walker graduated to a digital Portastudio he purchased with a pal and fellow aspiring songwriter, and by his reckoning he recorded 20 homemade albums, though it's unclear how many were ever distributed. Walker and several of his compatriots in home recording formed a band, Suckers, that gigged periodically in New York, but his big break came under appropriately unusual circumstances. Militia Shimkovitz, who runs the independent Voodoo-Eros Records label with Bianca Casady of CocoRosie, had been discussing a psychic vision in which she and Casady were being followed by a pair of giant cats when a CD of Walker's album Lion Land rolled out from behind a bookcase while a handful of friends were at her flat listening to music. No one is sure how the disc got into Shimkovitz's apartment, but seeing its sudden appearance as kismet, she popped the disc into her stereo and was immediately taken with the music. Walker soon became the first male artist signed to Voodoo-Eros, with Lion Land and an accompanying album, Laughter's an Asshole, released as a two-fer set in 2008.