James Ferraro was born in Rochester, New York, and is an underground musician/composer producing small runs of releases mainly on cassette and CDr on his New Age Tapes label since 2008. He records under a wide variety of pseudonyms and experiments in many diverse styles, and is also a member of The Skaters and Lamborghini Crystal.
Cited as an influence by an increasing number of producers, Ferraro is a critically acclaimed artist of the 21st Century POP ART wave. His most recent output includes 2011’s Far Side Virtual (Hippos in Tanks), which has undoubtedly fueled the amount of discussion and theorizing that surrounds his diverse body of work. In Far Side Virtual, Ferraro explores the chaos in today’s world by focusing on its most garish aspects and on the fetishes of today’s hyper-real capitalism.
The artist admits to approaching his work more as a painter than a musician. More concerned with creating a general impression of the world in the Impressionist tradition, Ferraro uses the colors of his musical bricolage to create a still-life that lets listeners draw their own conclusions from the familiar sounds embedded within slick, modern formulas. This approach allows Ferraro to keep up the pace within a rapidly-changing world where it is hard to stand behind one idea for long.
Fascinated by a culture of copies of copies of copies, where both older and newer products are readily available and have to compete for consumers’ limited attention, Ferraro has also turned his attention to radio culture in his newest album, I H A L E C – 4 $$$$$, released under his new BEBE T U N E S moniker. An album that is meant to sound best on iPhone speakers or mobile devices, it has the eerie quality of sounding both exactly and nothing at all like what’s on mainstream radio today. The songs are titled so as to make the listener feel they are browsing through a ringtone library, never far away from today’s omnipresent consumer culture.
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