Red Wire's music is written and performed by Jamie Kowalski, along with a few random guests who happen into his studio. Kowalski is a long-time veteran of the music scene, having played keyboards in bands as disparate as the DC's late-70s new wave band White Boy, and more recently the cool groove of Ted Hovis Band (Hovis makes a guest appearance on the Red Wire track Time to Run).
Kowalski started this life as a classical composer, and had a number of performances his orchestral and chamber pieces before applying those talents to his own flavor of rock music. You can hear some of this influence in The Mystery We Bear, with its use of strings and brass, and in Mercury in Retrograde where a piano quintet plays along with bass and guitar.
We like to call this "Surrealistic post-progressive head music." These offbeat rock songs feature unusual and provocative instrumentation, and words plucked from dreams and other random inspirations.
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