11:17 is Alex Daniel. Alex Daniel is 11:17.
11:17 has always been marked by dissolution. Alex started the project as a solo venture in 2004 after first drummer Corey Baltz and then drummer Jason Faries—now known for his work with Neon Indian—left his band.
11:17 began as a singer/songwriter venture preoccupied with intricate guitar lines and incisive lyricism, but like the first hints of predelay on a reversed loop, the experimentalism and studio-as-instrument ethos that would come to define 11:17 were already nascent.
To release the first 11:17 songs, Alex founded Red Oak Records with Josh Carel of Oolitic. Shortly after putting out their split CD, Josh walked away from the venture, and Alex let Red Oak die.
The River
In 2008 Alex began recording and producing The River, an autofictive concept album, darker in subject matter and tone than anything he had written before, unkind to everyone and everything it examined, including himself.
One fall night in Austin, Texas, 2009, he went drinking on 6th Street and, driven by thirst, decided it wasn’t worth it to stop at home first. He buried the backpack containing the laptop where the source tracks for The River were stored under a mound of clothes on the floorboards of his backseat and parked just west of I-35, on 12th Street, now the site of Waterloo Park, believing that his creative work was safely concealed.
It wasn’t.
An unknown assailant broke the rear passenger window and made off with the backpack, and Alex never saw the laptop again. The River seemed to be lost forever, but the thief did eventually visit Alex’s apartment while he wasn’t home.
After handing his roommate the stolen passport—which had also been in the backpack, along with (presumably?) a piece of mail that listed Alex’s address—the mysterious figure disappeared again.
(briefly) Becoming a Band
11:17 had to be rebooted. Alex wrote a couple of new songs, rerecorded some old ones, and released them as an EP called home. it was brighter than The River, though still a downer, and if thematically it was still steeped in the trappings of emo, its tentative steps into the world of loops and delay, from a production standpoint, were a sign of things to come.
Uncertain as to where he else he could take 11:17 alone, Alex enlisted the help of drummer Trevor Mason—now of Domestic Tallboys and Clover James fame—to flesh the songs out for a full band. The pair teamed up with guitarist Dago Garcia and bassist Tim Shin to play shows around Austin—including at Mohawk, and alongside Shakey Graves at Leslie Fest—but while recording and producing All We Need Is Here in the first half of 2012, Alex suffered a nervous breakdown, quit his day job, took the passport that had fortuitously been returned, and moved to South Korea.
Eastward Expansion
There Alex wrote a batch of new songs, had fun covering Nine Inch Nails, Leonard Cohen, and Idaho, and began pushing 11:17 further into electronic, experimental, and instrumental territory. With the release of Eastward Expansion at the end of 2013, Alex promised himself he would get home to continue performing.
One year away turned into two. Alex found himself leaving another job, giving away another set of possessions, cutting ties with another group of friends, wandering further afield. One night he drank something he probably shouldn’t have and spent the next 48 hours sweating nightmare—and then, for some ungodly reason, upon waking, he drank some more. What he saw and heard at the bottom terrified him. It was unlike anything he’d seen or heard before. He could no longer say with any certainty what was or wasn’t real. He stayed gone for another year, and then another, and another, and a couple more, and before he knew it…
last
last is a multimedia experience over 7 years in the making. Alex began writing songs for the album in Busan, South Korea in November of 2014 following a brush with…He continued writing, recording, and producing the tracks in Korea, Texas, and Colorado up until the album’s official release on February 22, 2022.
The first track to see the light of day was sublimation, posted on Monday, December 6, 2021, along with a short work of autofiction. The subsequent tracks were released every Monday for the next 12 weeks, each with its own accompanying text: sometimes prose, sometimes poetry, more often a hybrid form that landed somewhere in between.
March 22, 2022 saw the release of the last journal, a hardbound Moleskine that contains 63 pages of handwritten text, reproduced verbatim in each of the 11 editions of the journal, in pen. the content is familiar—it consists primarily of the lyrics and writings from the last album—but the form is new. Rather than the screen, the words are formatted for the page.
the last tape, a cassette of the last album that includes an alternate track order and unreleased music, released on November 17, 2022.
(last) rebirth
11:17 is once again based in Busan, South Korea, and is committed to releasing music every year on 11/17.
2023 and 2024 saw the release of two singles for the forthcoming album (last) rebirth, Raptor Pen Sub Level 2 and Built on Waves, as well as a retrospective collection of remastered and unreleased instrumentals, Electronic Adjacent Instrumentals, 2010-2024.
As long as Alex is breathing, you can expect more 11:17 every 11/17.
Stay tuned.
Contact
Send inquiries to elevenseventeen at elevenseventeenmusic dot com
Reach out to Alex directly at alexgilesdaniel at gmail dot com
