Dan English & Accessory

For the longing listener, the music of composer Dan English is the communing of the head and the heart sharing secrets. The songs subsume time into feelings and images of purity, sonically and spiritually, and then play with lyrics drawn from the dingier parts of life: love, family, and capricious head-spaces. It is movie-music; scores for an espionage film with a protagonist who is a clandestine, time-traveling romantic tailing the spirit itself.

Born in a quiet town in Iowa, he grew up chasing invisible things: codes in books, echoes in movies, half-sentences in songs. English found himself glued to the radio from an early age and, after picking up guitar at 10, language and sound conspired. Following a move to New York City, Dan released his first album “Fruit Boy” in 2018 followed by 2020’s “In Grace” EP. His newest offering, Sky Record (June 2025), is his second full-length album and continues to expand upon and probe the depths explored in his previous work. The music is part confession, part séance, spells where the sacred and the stained trade places. Emotions arrive in disguises: tenderness (smoke), grief (rhythm), silence (a cathedral on the verge of collapse).

In addition to his solo work, Dan moonlights as a guitarist for NYC rock outfit Porches and is often to be found collaborating with his cousin Melody English.

Accessory is the Chicago-based solo project of Jason Balla (from Dehd).

Their debut album, “Dust”, confirms Balla as a voice in experimental pop. He crafts an intimate sculpture of guitar feedback, electronic manipulation and everyday poetry, straddling the line between the digital and the organic. The songs are a constellation of misconnection, desire and the search for certainty in a reality dominated by distraction and defeatism.

At a time trending toward AI gloss, Balla employs the dadaist tradition of random chance to incorporate human imperfection and unpredictability into his work. The result is songs that live and breathe, marked with the fingerprints of process and shaped by emotional undercurrents that flow beneath a calm surface.