David Karsten Daniels is a San Francisco-based songwriter by way of North Carolina and Oregon, whose music relays a personal history of diverse musical experiences - among them, a childhood of hymn singing, membership of a high school jazz band, and a formal university training in composition, theory, free improvisation, and performance art. For several years, David travelled throughout Texas and France recording quietly in small rooms, where his formal training began to give way to four-track experimentation, juxtaposing the phase pieces and improvisation of his academic life with lo-fi acoustic compositions. This itinerant approach to recording produced his first two albums (‘The Mayflower’ 2000; ‘Out From Under Ligne 4’, 2001) , which employ the use of whatever (non)instruments were at hand, such as dropped coins and pencil scratches in place of drum kits, or lyrics composed by rearranging the contents of the daily newspaper.
David finished his studies and spent the subsequent year in Portland, Oregon, briefly experimenting with a laptop before moving to North Carolina with Daniel Hart and Alex Lazara to found the Bu_Hanan Collective. There, while giving his first two albums a wider release, he wrote and recorded the self-released album, ‘Angles’ (2004), as well as contributing to the records of the collective’s other bands.
