Satellite Grooves is the melody unit of one person, John Kale. Experimenting with sound, John delivers electronic based music that incorporates, beautiful and lush, melodies with blips and bleeps allowing the listener to experience a dream like state through songs. The sounds are sometimes spacious interludes that take you off to far off to distant planets or into dreams like those you may find similar depicted in a video game. Satellite Grooves is a vessel of sound that was not created out of thin air but from a life long journey into music and art experiences. John’s early workings with his own mid 90’s Emo Hardcore band, Eurich (at the time was based out of Charleston, South Carolina) led him into finding roads into experimentation with music. This band went the route of DIY releasing their own records on John’s self started record label at the time, Fragil records. Silk screening their own shirts and doing their own show promotion it was a learning experience for John that would create a life long addiction to creating music. After their demise, John found himself curing his itch to create music by creating melodies with his toy Casio keyboards and recording onto his 4 track recorder. A much more pop oriented and experimental approach to music, John called this project the Sequencial Circuits. The Sequencial Circuits went with John from his home in Gainesville, Florida to eventually Olympia, Washington. His songs were outlets of emotion that told the listener of his life experiences that were obviously changing as rapid as his locations. The Sequencial Circuits released a few records and were the final records to be released on Fragil records. The experimentation with music in this bedroomtronic medium led to obtaining better equipment to fine tune the sound that John was striving for. The songs began to mold into more electronic based sounds rather than the lo fi emo pop sound that the Sequencial Circuits had become. Through this progression, and as time spent, John changed his moniker to Satellite Grooves.
Satellite Grooves basically started around the end of 1999. Over the past 3 years John has been creating and releasing his songs on various labels such as Skylab Operations, Vex, TBTMO, Kikapu, and even his new self ran record label, Slide the Needle. With each release you can tell he’s coming closer to his own sound changing the face of what music is and introducing, somewhat, what music can be with his perception..
Playing live is always a challenge for Satellite Grooves. Though there is somewhat an experimental feel to his recorded material, performing live broadens the road to experimenting with his songs. Occasionally, visuals are added to the performances to boost the over all feel of the performance. It is truly an ever changing experience and it can be promised that if you see Satellite Grooves once, it will not be the same the next time. It’s not because Satellite Grooves has a lost sense of identity, but rather because in John’s mind, music can be released differently depending on mood, and direction John is interested in playing with that evening.
What leads to the conclusion to this bio is where does Satellite Grooves fall if you must put it in a genre? This is an ever questing question that even John has, but to simplify the task John just calls it beep music. Or maybe indie electro pop idm computer experimental bleep beep music. You make the judgment…