Dan Easley

Rev. Dan Easley was born near Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A. in 1979. He excelled in academics throughout childhood. In early adolescence he abandoned his natural gifts in science and mathematics for studies in religion, psychology, music, and poetry. This nearly killed him.

His primary motive is to produce traditional and experimental folk music and media, constructed and distributed via the multimedia studio and recording label he founded in 2002, Towndowner Records. He writes for and plays a number of instruments, including guitar, mandolin, keyboards, saxophone and drums. He has been known to use violins, banjos, accordions and noseflutes for nefarious purposes.

He's lived in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia since he was twelve (with a few brief excursions: the mountains of North Carolina, temperate rainforests of Alaska, and some time on Route 66). He currently works as operations manager for public radio stations WMRA and WEMC. Prior to that he was a director and videographer for three years at WVPT, a public television station. He got his start in public broadcasting at KRBD, a small community radio station in Ketchikan, Alaska, when he was seventeen, hosting an eclectic music program with his Dad.

He is also an ordained minister, with both the Universal Life Church of Modesto, California, and the Church of the Subgenius. He is available for weddings, baptisms, and funerals, and will work for food, drink, or interesting books.

Dan plays guitar and sings for The Lotus Eaters, an old-time string band (Appalachian folk music); makes a variety of noises as half of The Kindly Ones, a partnership with Frédéric Dorée (who plays computer), and plays in The Shakes, a musical collaboration with Mark Lane, an old schoolmate.

Dan has been interested in computers and computer-mediated communication since 1987, when he got a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Home Computer, and took classes in MS-DOS 2.1 and GW-BASIC. He first signed onto the Internet in 1993; participants in the MicroMuse project, especially during the mid-nineties, may know Dan as "Brennus". In recent years he's been administrator of a consortium of not-for-profit and artist-oriented websites.

A few of Dan's aesthetic influences include Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian film director; Syd Barrett, Bob Dylan, and Peter Gabriel; Bela Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, and Wolfgang Mozart; William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder; Arthur Rimbaud; the Dada artists; the Marx Bros.; the Appalachian Mountains.