Giacomo "Jake" Modica
San Francisco
Giacomo Modica is an American musician based in California, and is best known as the songwriter and guitarist from his former rock band, Nine Even. In 2019 Giacomo enlisted Travis Quinn (Sun Valley Gun Club) on Drums & Percussion, and Scott Foster Harris (Orchid’s Bloom) on Lead Vocals, to record the first album of a new concept based project. The album, “Lexiconmind,” was released in instrumental form in July of 2019, and will come out in its completed form on May 29th 2020. In addition to the album’s nine songs, Giacomo and Co., have already recorded two non-album songs, and are continuing to work on more material. The first single, “Simple Wonders,” was released on February 14th, 2020, and the second single on March 6th. Giacomo will continue to release another song every three weeks for the foreseeable future. Giacomo has played many live shows in the past and is looking forward to getting back out to promote the new material in a variety of ways.
Since this new project is a conceptual album, Giacomo Modica will be releasing a companion book with artwork by graphic storyteller GMB Chomichuk in 2020 as well. Giacomo has been putting together the storylines on this project, “Lexiconmind” being the first chapter, since 2010. “Lexiconmind” begins to tell the tale of the sci-fi future of the Lumeil Union, and primarily of three characters who have reached crossroads in their lives. They each find themselves having to choose between what they consider to be their past and possible future trajectories. And by the way, there is also a planetoid sized mass of liquid-like energy that consumes anything in the mass' way.
All in all, this new project is the distillation of many of Giacomo Modica’s creative interests. From a young age in the 1980s, the many worlds of comic book legend Jack Kirby and the lore of Star Wars set Giacomo’s mind free. The music of John Williams also worked its way deep into Giacomo’s mind, only to be fully explored later in life. In the formative 1990s, Modica became a sponge for the Alternative Rock music scene, especially bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, U2, Radiohead, PJ Harvey, and Catherine Wheel. He also drew inspiration from a lot of the comic book and graphic novel work of writers and artists like Alan Moore, John Ostrander, Bill Sienkiewicz, Tom Mandrake, James Robinson, Tony Harris, and John Paul Leon. Giacomo also developed a growing interest in the progressive rock of the 1970s and onward, such as King Crimson, Rush, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin, as well as the sci-fi spiritualism of Philip K. Dick. In the 2000s Giacomo started to pull all those musical influences together into his band Nine Even, with whom he played both regionally, and nationally across the United States. When the 2010s hit a renewed interest in the film soundtrack, and post-rock instrumental worlds reignited Giacomo’s creative fires. Artists like Mogwai, Hans Zimmer, and Russian Circles started to consume a lot of hours of Modica’s time. In addition to those open vistas of musical expression, Giacomo found a somewhat surprising interest in more pop-based, more streamlined and concise songwriting world of bands like Paramore, Foster the People and Phantogram. Giacomo knew then that his next steps needed to pass through all of these filters to form something that felt new to him. The “Lexiconmind” album is the beginning of that filtering process. 2020 is when Giacomo Modica is bringing what he loves from the past, into the present, to create a new future.
Giacomo Modica’s tracks
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