Chicago sound engineer/multi-instrumentalist Che Arthur (guitarist/singer of Pink Avalanche and former guitarist in Atombombpocketknife) releases two very stylistically different EPs under his new moniker Professor Downfall, featuring himself on all instruments.
The project started in 2014 under the name 9 9 0 0. The album The Soft Repentance released under that name was an intentionally casual affair. As Arthur tells it, “I was on tour in Europe doing sound for a band [in Arthur’s “day job” he is a touring sound engineer] and needed something to do during the long van rides. So I started making beats in headphones in the van every day, and after a while I had so many that I figured I might as well make songs of some sort with them and show them to people.”
Creating this music by himself with no expectations, no plans for commercial release – or even live shows – turned out to be something of a breath of fresh air for Arthur, whose current and previous bands and projects had been more guitar-based, traditional “rock band” situations or solo acoustic and vocal performances. “So I put it on Bandcamp only, for free, just to have it out in the world for anyone who might be interested, told my friends about it, and that was pretty much that.”
“I eventually started on a second bunch of songs, and that wound up being 5 years of very sporadically working on them. But about half of those songs are EADJ, and i’m gonna eventually do something else with the others. Then I did all of the Sol songs this spring while i’ve been stuck at home because of the pandemic – they’re very different from the EADJ songs, were all very spontaneously written and recorded but have a vibe and thread of their own running through them, so they made sense as a separate release instead of adding them to the existing material.”
Thus two EP releases at once – EADJ and Sol.