Overview
My name is Cosmo Jarvis.
Hello, my name is Cosmo Jarvis. I am from Totnes, Devon U.k, but I was Born in 1989 in Ridgewood, New Jersey, U.S.A. My full name is Harrison Cosmo Krikoryan Jarvis. but since birth i have been called Cosmo apart from when i get called a dickhead. I am not a band, if my name was Richard Jarvis, everyone would fucking get it. I am a Songwriter/Filmmaker/Actor/Producer.
When i was very young i had piano lessons from a guy called Mr. Brennan. i stopped after a while. i was always around music because of my parents and started liking it from a very young age. The first song i can remember hearing was Barbara Ann by the Beach boys. That was when i was baby age, my favorite song is Blackbird by the Beatles. That is why i write music. My dad got me into Tom Waits and the Grateful dead and Talking Heads and a bunch of other stuff, my mom was more the Bowie and Beatles side of things. This is some of the music that is very important to me: Mad Dog Mcrea, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul Mcartney, the Grateful Dead, Super Tramp, Bob Dylan, Elliot Smith, Aretha Franklin, john lee hooker, Chicago Transit Authority, Steely Dan, Weather Report, Jacko Pastorious, Victor Wooten, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, The Temptations, Dreamettes, Stevie Wonder, Adam Sandler, The Miracles, Moby, Daft Punk, Panic at the Disco, Gym Class heros, My Chemical Romance, Johnny Cash, Tenacious D, John Williams, Thomas Newman, Randy Newman, James Horner, Crazy Town, Average White Band, James Brown, Jimmy Hendrix, the Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Ry Cooder, ian Dury and the Block Heads, the Stanglers, Bob Marley, Peter Gabriel, AC/DC, Yael Naim, The Police, Curtis King, Paul Mcartney, George Harrison,Joni Mitchell, Will Smith, Jackson 5, System of a down, Dave Mathews Band, Less Than Jake, Drop Kick Murphies, Jack Johnson, Sum 41, Greenday (old), Tina Turner, Niel Young, Beyonce Knowles, Nizlopi, Stravinsky, G Love, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Fountains of Wayne, Somthing Corperate, Spice Girls, Bernard Herman, Roland Alphonso, John Barry, Eiffel 65, Fallout Boy, Killswitch Engage, Eminem, Muse, Corinne Bailey Rae, Tupac Shakur, Sage Francis, Ice Cube, NWA, Stevie Wonder, Arlo Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Dire Straits, Traditional Jewish Folk and Russian Folk, Kelly Clarkson, Hans Zimmer, Gerry Rafferty, Bulgarian gospel, Pendulem, Paramore, R. Crumb, XTC, Link Ray, Linkin Park, SugaBabes, Kanye West, Nelly Furtado, the Pussycat Dolls, Jerry Lee Lewis, June Carter, September, Queen, Basement Jaxx, Montgomery Gentry, John Mayall, Sigur Ross, Eddie Vedder, Rufus Wainwright, Danny Elfman, Electric Six, Jamelia, Nirvana, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Peter Sarstedt, the Kinks, Simon and Garfunkel, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Kraftwerk, Rachmaninov, Joe Pace and the Colorado Mass Choir, James Brown, Led Zeppelin, Rage Against the Machine, Ice Cube, Limp Bizkit, Daft Punk, the Shins, Imogen Heap, Frou Frou, Ben.E.King, ZZ top, Lenny Kravitz, Henry Mancini
I always played piano, i liked blues, but at secondary school it hit me that guitar was way cooler and so i started that because one time after a party i was playing piano and nobody gave a shit and my mate Dom was playing guitar and lets just say Sweet home Alabama could of got him laid that night. After much family shit, moved to Totnes, and i started recording songs, i started just doing instrumental stuff cos i was too scared to sing, but then i did one song which i cant remember and i started from there. I like to write different kinds of song, i write about, people, dreams, nasty stuff, films, girls, memory's, guilt, boring situations, stories, how time kills your being , just whatever actually. So yeah i was recording all this stuff with a drum machine, acoustic guitar and a hands free Internet phone handset as a mic. Now though, when im making records i play everything in em that i can, like Piano, Bass, and Mandolin type stuff and i just got an Accordion and a Banjo, and i love them. I also love the Double bass. Piano is my favorite instrument though. Because it can stand alone and justify everything it says.
I kept on and stuff between school, which i was o.k at but i it wasn't great, i hate authority very much i guess, the fact that you had to be there, and if you weren't you were bad, but it seemed like a waste of time, unless you wanted uni, or just some grades, but i hated how black and white it was. Teachers saw it like, if you were a good student you had to follow the rules and that made you a smart person with potential. Where in fact (1). if you were doing badly, you might not be stupid, you might just want something else because you knew you were only there because your parents told you so. And (2) it was sickeningly easy for someone who was thick to climb the educational ladder with a smile on his/her face, just by following the rules that teachers enforced. This didn't require any ambition or intelligence at all, just the ability to say yes and bite the bullet, which kind of bastardized my understanding of what a school was for. so i lost respect for it, and any other system modeled on people advancing with in it by the means of someone else, (of a greater social or professional classification) simply allowing them to do so because they had 'gone along' with whatever it was they had to 'go along' with for that to happen. This is OK for some people, because they don't know better, but some people know that they are only doing something, or acting one way, because if they don't, the modern world view of what they will achieve and eventually become, will be less than what they need it to be to feel o.k about their life. What my point was think was, that people are too scared that they wont feel alright about their lives unless they go about life they way that the world ( at that time ) has become accustomed too. Of course, it wasn't just this that made be realise this. It was civil law, social workers, neighbors, other kids parents and a whole mess of other things. I also don't want anyone reading this to think i have lived, and will live my life without letting this happen, because i think its impossible, i just think there are different dimensions of freedom, and it should be an individual choice which dimensions to exist in, and also when too.
Anyway, all me and my friends wanted to do was stuff, but we couldn't. so we messed around, and then i found out that you could make friends if you were a shit. i was good at that and so one thing led to another and then the first thing was getting smaller everyday. Then, i wrote about girls cos i spose they were important in that time, i mean they still are but then they were new and when you're drunk it was totally blown up and crazy and stuff. And so i wrote about that, and other things, i also wrote a lot of pop songs, and reggae songs and folk songs and some other stuff but i never wrote anything to be played live. I just made recordings. But you have to play stuff live and so now i have to do that, sometimes i do it acoustic and sometimes with my band but some of my songs cant really be done all that well cos they are more about the recordings. Anyway, song writing was really new and then i did it more and more and it was pretty much all i did apart from make films and stuff.
My films are usually short films or sketches or just weird stuff, i act in them with my friends mostly, or just do them alone in my house. I made them using a free program from ulead. I think final cut is a god damn gimmick if your working with dv. You can see them on the view my vids bit. I started making movies with a web-cam when i was real young, in some of the early ones, my balls were so far from being dropped i sounded like a ring-tone. Gradually got better from messing around, so now i make all the music videos and stuff. I tried to make a feature length movie about these kids, my brother and some of my other friends were in it, its was o.k but I'm gonna remake it one day. Anyway i aside from little movies. I like the relationship between music and film and how together they can be one thing, and apart they can totally different. I like making films with no music to test the story telling side of things too. and I'm also into fake and real documentary type shorts and sound design is a big part of what I do with films too. My favorite directors are Wes Anderson, Spike Lee, John Lasseter, Mr Spielberg, George Lucas, Judd Apatow, M. Night Shyamalan, Tony Gilroy, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan.
Slowly I wrote songs about more things that at first i felt strange writing about and write all the time now. In terms of production, i hate that people have to be one thing to be a songwriter. i like to record a song as what i want it to be, recently recordings have been artistically cheapened i think. i Like to write songs about things that are there to be thought about, but also i like to write songs that are there only to be songs. I hate that the artist matters more than the song does. that is why so many great artists kinda just hang around, and so many shit ones are grated up, made into pills and rammed down our throats every morning before breakfast. But that's the way it is. Everyone creates their fair share of shit at some point.
I have a lot of stuff so some of you will hear some of it and like it. These are my films and songs, if i think of anything else to say ill add it later. from Cosmo
And So I Watch You From Afar
Bloody brilliant band from Belfast, manic, fantastic, well worth seeing live. As Kerrang put it ""And So I Watch You From Afar..march over introspective horizons....(they) can do nothing wrong"
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