the rammed earth

One bleak and rainy day in 2004, twenty-seven year old Sean Rasmussen sat down in his Idaho City living room and began recording songs he had been creating on his brother’s acoustic guitar. Drawing from recent personal chaos, and a background in instrumental jazz, he recorded as a one man band, playing and recording each instrument one at a time. Fleshing out skeletal song ideas. The initial work was much more catharsis than entertainment, but the songs had some merit, and over time, they began to develop into something worthwhile, if a bit rough around the edges.
Later that year, while rock climbing in the Boise foothills, Sean met fellow climber and lead guitarist, Travis Kocian. The two quickly realized their similar interest in music, and eventually began to experiment again with the songs Sean had stored away. So began the friendship and collaboration that would become The Rammed Earth.
Late in 2006, long-time friends Aaron Couture and Jack Ramsey were brought in to play drums, and Gabe Rudow , a recent Athens, Georgia transplant, answered a desperate, pitiful, craigslist plea for a bassist. The Rammed Earth had finally become a functional band.
And the sound grew. The musicians grew. The new product dwarfing the recordings and taking on a life of it’s own, as sounds are wont to do. Obvious influences abound, but The Rammed Earth is not a derivative of any one band. Rather they are a derivative of many bands, spanning many genres. It’s easy to hear the influence of indie standards like Pavement, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips, and Built to Spill, newer tastes of The Helio Sequence, The Strokes, and The Starlight Mints, as well as bows to the tasteful alt-folk of Wilco and Elliot Smith. Metalica? Coltrane? The Beatles? Dylan? Steely Dan you say? Yeah, it’s all kind of in there somewhere. You see, much like all those artists before them, these guys have a wide array of musical interests and that comes out in their playing and songwriting. And the beauty of popular music is that the precipitate of all that confusion, somehow becomes a new thing, and the cycle continues on.
The Rammed Earth is now ready to take their new thing public. Everything has been dismantled and reworked, vocal harmonies added, synth parts written. The songs are ready to be judged by the populous in that most critical of all auditions, the stage at your local club. We’ll see you there.