The Levon Sobieski Domination

Author: jsomers December 2, 2024 0 Comments

SO, as you may or may not be aware, I have, for the last ten years or so, been releasing music under the auspices of a nonexistent band called The Levon Sobieski Domination. We have twelve albums. Twelve! Here’s one of their recent songs:

The Levon Sobieski Domination: Cannibalism 101
The Levon Sobieski Domination: Cannibalism 101

Here’s the new album:

This all started because The Duchess, my sainted wife, got tire of my Middle Aged White Man moaning about how I always wanted to learn how to play guitar, so she bought me a guitar and some lessons and told me to do something about it. Which she now regrets, because I often make her listen to my songs and I can always pinpoint the moment when her soul leaves her body.

But I digress: For me the creative process in any medium is all about an audience. If you write a novel and no one reads it, did you write a novel? Or did you spend a few months pretending? I never had any interest in learning classic songs or campfire sing-a-long guitar stuff; I’m not the guy who shows up to our party with his guitar and everyone gathers around expectantly as I launch into Wonderwall. I’m the guy who shows up to your party with a $4 bottle of wine and proceed to drink all of your top-shelf liquor and falls asleep in your bathtub.

So I started composing my own songs. I’ve composed 1,451 of them so far, each 2-4 minute little instrumental rock tunes. And since the whole point is to find an audience, I invented a band and started releasing songs like this one:

The Levon Sobieski Domination: Boomstick
From the forthcoming album “Once.”

I can’t just create this aggressively mediocre songs and not release them, because I compulsively need an audience. There’s just no point to creating something if you can’t at least have the possibility that someone will experience it someday.

All of these songs are 100% written and performed by me (the drums are programmed) and recorded, if we use the term loosely, while sitting at my desk surrounded by cats. If no one ever listens to them (which, so far, seems like a safe bet) at least in theory someone could, and that’s enough to drive me to keep doing this. Just in case you were putting together a committee to beg me to stop, for the good of the country.

Huzzah!

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The Department of Useless Endeavors

Author: jsomers February 19, 2022 0 Comments

Lord knows I’ve never let failure or obscurity stop me from pushing Somers Thought onto the world. In fact, the more the world obnoxiously ignores Somers Thought, the harder I push it out there in whatever form it takes.

As some of you may know, I occasionally release music under the name The Levon Sobieski Domination, a band with exactly one member (one and a half if you count the program I use to sequence the drums). No one really cares, which is hurtful, but I do it anyway because I firmly believe that if you create something, you should put it out there. Otherwise, what’s the point?

So, The Levon Sobieski Domination keeps on truckin’. I’m about to release their ninth album — it’ll show up on Spotify and elsewhere soon — and to celebrate I went ahead and worked on another futile project no one ever pays attention to: A video constructed entirely from stock clips. Here’s “Blackout Eve” from The Levon Sobieski Domination:

The Levon Sobieski Domination: Blackout Eve
“Blackout Eve” by The Levon Sobieski Domination from the album “The Levon Sobieski Domination IX”

The name Levon Sobieski goes back a long way. If you are actually named Levon Sobieski, I apologize in advance. Back when I was publishing my zine, The Inner Swine, I created a persona for myself which was sort of an alcoholic, shambolic Bond Villain with a dash of Hugh Hefner: Jeff Somers was a tyrannical zine publisher who ran a shadowy global empire. I imagined a cast of bizarre characters who populated the Inner Swine compound, and one of those characters was a guy named Levon Sobieski, an Eastern European man I had kidnapped and forced to work as a custodian. Levon would pop up with commentary from time to time, usually expressing deep unease and befuddlement at my drunken antics.

Yes, this is how a grown man spent his time. What’s your point?

Anyways, a decade or so ago when I started to take guitar playing seriously and formed the totally imaginary band I chose Levon Sobieski in part as a link to that past era of my life, and in part because the idea of a middle-aged custodian fronting a rock band was humorous to me.

I hop y’all enjoy the song and the video, and keep an eye out for The Levon Sobieski Domination IX, coming soon.

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The Stock Video Challenge

Author: jsomers May 8, 2021 0 Comments

LIVING IN THE FUTURE is fantastic. When I was a wee child growing up in the wilds of The Heights neighborhood in Jersey City, my brother Yan and I had outsize ambitions when it came to creativity and self-entertainment. I’ve written about some of our weird childhood projects on this blog before, and what’s amazing about them to Adult Jeff is how much effort they required just for the raw materials. When we constructed elaborate Star Wars-themed photosets complete with captions and blaster shots added via markers, we had to first assemble a world-class collection of Star Wars action figures, then we had to take a few dozen posed photos with them, get those photos developed, add in our ‘special effects’, write the story to go along with the photos, then mount them to paper, then force our poor, beleaguered parents to pretend to care about it, since they were our only audience.

Yan and I had a very slight interest in film-making; we lacked any real drive for it, and the tools were beyond the reach of our allowances. We never had a camera of any kind, or any training, but we always liked the idea of making films or animations. Back then, it was impossible. Today, my friends, we have stock video.

Building a Mystery

I’ve been obsessed with the idea of creating a visual narrative using stock video for years. In fact, I used to make some money off the concept by making book trailers for myself and my fellow authors. I like the challenge of the concept, the constraint. I don’t have direct control over the clips — the lighting, the actors, the style, or even how many there are featuring the same people and places. Trying to create something coherent and interesting with whatever you can find in the stock bins is, frankly, kind of fun.

I’m also an amateur musician, and I’ve invented a fake rock band called The Levon Sobieski Domination to release my music through. A few years ago, I tried my hand at creating a music video using a mix of stock and shots I created using my phone at home:

tHE bLIZZARD
A half-assed music video from Jeff Somers. Because no one asked me to.

Not exactly a cinematic masterpiece, but you get the idea. I came to realize that the mix of slick stock video and my own shaky-cam clips didn’t work, so when I returned to the concept last year, I stuck to stock video:

The Levon Sobieski Domination: Elephant in the Room
No Description

That turned out better. Recently, I’ve returned to the concept with a vengeance simply because it’s fun for me. I love finding a few dozen stock clips and trying to set a mood or tell a story of some sort with them. Here are three video I made in the last few weeks for songs I’m releasing:

“Rearview”

No Title
“Rearview” from the album “Seven” by the Levon Sobieski Domination (2020).

This one’s a mood, not a story and was basically inspired when I realized the surprising amount of cinematic stock video there is of ballerinas.

“Day Drank”

A song from the upcoming release, this video tells a pretty loose story that’s entirely on brand, I think. It started with a clip of business folks dancing in their office, and I took it in the most ridiculous direction possible.

Day Drank by The Levon Sobieski Domination
“Day Drank” by the Levon Sobieski Domination, from the album “Eight”

“Riding My Own Melt”

This one was a bit more of a challenge; once you go beyond ‘mood’ or incredibly broad narrative like “unhappy workers get day drunk and start dancing” it gets more difficult to tell a story of any kind. But in the end I think this pulled together nicely.

No Title
“Riding My Own Melt” by The Levon Sobieski Domination, from the album “Eight”

It’s fun to work on a creative project that has nothing tied to it. Whether anyone watches these videos or listens to these songs doesn’t matter: What matters is I had fun making them. And maybe you had fun watching them! Since science has yet to discover the discouragement that can deter me from unleashing such things on the world, I’ll very likely keep making these. You’ve been warned.

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