Damien Tavis Toman

Damien Tavis Toman (born c. 1982) is a singer-songwriter, recording artist, and author from the Catskill mountain region of New York State. Since beginning his recording career in 2002, Toman has self-released more than 20 albums, inviting comparisons to other obsessively motivated members of the lo-fi music movement such as Jandek and Daniel Johnston.

Music

Unlike many of his DIY contemporaries, Toman’s recording efforts have rarely spilled over into the realm of pure experimentalism (an exception is the 2007 album Anthem, which consists of the same keyboard line played repeatedly for about 20 minutes, with inarticulate vocal accompaniment.) Rather, much of Toman’s output is better defined as minimalist folk rock, distinguished mainly by Toman’s morose lyricism, simplistic song structures, plaintive vocal delivery, and distinctive guitar playing. A certain tendency towards pop has pervaded Toman's work, however, and most of his songs manage to be at least a little catchy.

Toman’s lyrical themes have changed little over the course of his many recordings, remaining fixated on the subjects of marriage, religion, mortality, and suicide. (Incidentally, these same subjects are explored exhaustively in his book of philosophical Observations.) His music has undergone subtle transformations, however, presumably as a result of his simply growing more musically proficient over time. While three- or four-chord folk songs in a minor key have remained his consistent specialty, Toman has also ventured into punk, heavy metal, rockabilly, and other genres.

In years past, Toman offered to send his albums on home-burnt CD-Rs to anyone who requested them, but in recent times he has placed his whole catalogue online, and has released his newest albums as MP3 downloads. Evidently reclusive and solitary by nature, Toman has played live on only a handful of occasions, always unaccompanied. His albums seem to be entirely self-performed, except for a few rare inclusion of a female back-up vocalist. The typical Damien Tavis Toman recording consists of rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass guitar, and single or multiple vocals. On some albums, he has made judicious use of such instruments as a drum machine, an electric keyboard, and various wind instruments.

Writing

Toman’s book, When the Hand of Death Seeks You in Youth: Selected Epistolary Observations, first appeared on the artist’s personal web site in the summer of 2008, and claims to consist of excerpts from letters he wrote to unnamed recipients (whom he collectively refers to as “the Circle”) between 2005 and 2008. The book highlights not only his eerily old-fashioned prose style, which seems very Victorian in character, but also an equally outdated philosophical outlook, by which he promotes such social and political archaisms a return to monarchist or dictatorial rule and the reinstitution of arranged marriages. Beyond this, much of the book is concerned with Toman’s own feelings of inferiority and self-loathing, which are prominent in his lyrics. The title of the book, in fact, is derived from a line in one of Toman’s songs, “When You’re Cold and Lonely and Lost.”

Several articles posted on his web site indicate that Toman has also worked as a journalist, writing human interest pieces for local newspapers and magazines.

Relationship to the Media

For reasons known only to the artist himself, Damien Tavis Toman has shown considerable reluctance in submitting his work to media scrutiny. In 2005, Jim Griffin, an amateur reviewer for the locally-focused Online magazine TheHVScene.com discovered the obscure punk-rock EP titled What? (which later went to comprise a portion of the album Compendium Mediocris) and wrote a spirited article about it, praising the songs themselves, but disparaging the lo-fi recording ethic. After this, Toman continued to send the magazine his new releases for a period of a year, and Griffin continued to review them, both favorably and unfavorably. In one instance, Griffin called Toman "the goth artist for this generation," representing "an entire culture's (sic) of underground goth music," and added that his albums were the "greatest pieces of art work in American history ." For all his occasional enthusiasm, Griffin's opinions on the artist vacillated wildly, and his articles were invariably marred by grammatical errors, solicisms, and flagrant hyperbole. On the one occasion that the magazine employed a reviewer other than Griffin, the writer's reaction was tepid, and sharply critical of Toman's "homemade" approach .

One other Web-based publication, Deadbolt Magazine reviewed four of Toman's albums between 2005 and 2007, always warmly . A restructuring of the website in 2007 to a blog format seems to have erased two of these reviews.

Since Toman's albums are digital releases, which he has consistently declined to manufacture professionally, they defy normal distribution conventions, and would not easily find their way into the hands of mainstream reviewers.

Discography
* 2008 - The Choice to Be Lonely
* 2008 - Always Always Ends
* 2008 - The Gospel of Our Times
* 2007 - In the Graveyard
* 2007 -
* 2007 - Make 'Em Scream
* 2007 - The Prodigal EP
* 2007 -
* 2007 - Anthem
* 2006 - Someday' is Our Codeword
* 2006 - Easter Sunday
* 2006 - Fascinating Creature
* 2005 - Kid Dracula
* 2005 - The Gothic Apocrypha
* 2005 - Beautiful, Beautiful Music
* 2005 - New Gospel
* 2005 - Compendium Mediocris (Punk-rock Recordings)
* 2005 - Circles, etc.
* 2004 - Grief and Grieving
* 2003 - Pandora's Bedroom
* 2003 - Float Around and Moan
* 2002 - Songs Born Out of Wedlock, vol. II
* 2002 - Songs Born Out of Wedlock, vol. I

Sources and external links
* Damien Tavis Toman's official website
* When the Hand of Death Seeks You in Youth
* Deadbolt Magazine (contains D.T.T. reviews)
* TheHVScene.com (contains D.T.T. reviews)

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See Also

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