Exorcising Ghosts by Geoff Doner

All music on Exorcising Ghosts is entirely improvised on piano without any prep or forethought.

Born and raised in Collingwood, Ontario, I grew up surrounded by musical and artistic influences. My mom, Sheila, played piano and sang in various choirs and still does. My dad, Don, played trumpet in a handful of different swing and dixieland jazz bands, jamming in the rec room while I watched as a kid. One such band, The Georgian Sound Big Band, has now been around for over 30 years. At 87, my Dad continues to play.

At the age of five I was enrolled in the Royal Conservatory Of Music, pursuing classical piano in practice and theory for the next decade. At the same time, I developed his artistic talents producing 2D visual art in various mediums including oil/arcrylic painting, charcoal and pencil drawing. The subject matter was often of a surreal, disturbing nature, exploring themes ranging from fantastical landscapes to death and dismemberment.

In my early teens, the confines and structure of my classical training on piano inspired a need to explore more contemplative, intuitive musical expression. It was then that I began sitting down at the piano with no music in front of me, pressing record on my parents' cassette player and just playing intuitively, sometimes for half an hour straight or longer. This new contemplative, intuitive approach was a necessary deprogramming of sorts and it allowed me to "come back" to music with the solid foundation of classical training, but with an open, experimental approach. This also allowed me to “get out of my own way” and express deeper layers of myself, a very liberating experience indeed.

An Electro Acoustic Pop Ambient Goth Rock music project created and produced by Geoff Doner, composer, musician and cofounder of Bureau Of Power & Light (BPL), an art collective cultivating creative energies for positive social impact.

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