For the past 8 years I have existed as two people; “The Ukulele Bandito” and “Complainerman”
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The Ukulele Bandito
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The Ukulele Bandito is my positive face. The face I wear 95% of the time. He is the mask I put on to shield those around me from the inner turmoil, created by external forces beyond my control, that I find myself exposed to on a regular basis.

He plays bright, colourful songs full of love, happiness and celebrates the joy of being. I created him when my daughter was born and he has managed to keep me alive professionally with live shows, video projects and a list of over 700 commercial clients who all came to me to work my music video magic for their special events, birthday songs, celebrations and advertising.

Yes, advertising.

As an artist with a need to express his complex cultural roots and personal challenges through art, it is always soul crushing to dedicate the majority of your time to creating jingles, video and advertising constructs to help propel the consumer paradigm. But being a Father and a husband makes that necessary.

Do or die, they say.

So I came at each Ukulele Bandito project with 1000% commitment to creating the best work I could, given the circumstances, and managed to maintain a 100% quality rating that kept my customers coming back for more. I have always provided services in excess of what I have been paid to do because, well, this is my legacy. I wanted my daughter to be proud of me when she gets older and starts to understand what I had to do to keep us alive and happy. I have planted dozens of “easter eggs” that relate to our lives, for her to find as she begins to explore my back catalogue. She shows up in a lot of my video work.
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Complainerman
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ComplainerMan was created so that I could explore themes that had no commercial value beyond the songs and videos themselves. Songs that addressed my fears, concerns and worries about the world that my daughter was growing up in. Songs about the state of the economy, political leadership, ecology and my inner struggle to maintain a happy face during significant times of distress which seem to have followed my family throughout history.

Through Complainerman I reveal what goes on deep inside my creative mind and thereby give myself relief. Each song is a catharsis, me speaking my mind, out loud, without a filter. I seek truth and honesty, searching endlessly for those genuine authentic moments and hoping, when I release them to the world for scrutiny, that I will not be crucified or exiled for saying the things which, to me, have become facts about what it is to live in this world.

Complainerman is me as whistleblower, dissident, pundit, pugilist, conspiracy theorist and all those other personalities that people often don’t want to acknowledge. This is the project where I question authority and the wisdom of a free market economy that seems to have no regard for people, putting profit, corruption and moral decay before all else.

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The Balance of All Things
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Newton’s Third Law states; “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. I believe that you cannot know happiness without sadness, success without failure, liberation without frustration, love without hate. It is hard to accept that sometimes, and I do what I can to stay on the Yang side, the light sight of my personal equation. There will always be dark times and they will pass to yield the light. And then, after a time, a darkness will reappear, and then again the light. And so it goes, ad infinitum.

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This album has been an absolutely all consuming endeavour. I have never gotten behind something as viscerally as I have with this. I am so happy with every one of these songs.

I have approached this album in much the same way the artists did when I was a kid. I have produced liner notes that explain the origins and emotional foundations of the songs, artwork plates for each song to help conjure images in your mind and easter eggs to several of my other projects that have, to date, received no audience. One day I will print a vinyl version because, when I was a kid, I would sit around for hours with my records, listening to the music and looking at the covers.

I loved the double albums the most because they opened up like a book and the sleeves were covered with words and pictures.

I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I did creating it.

Words and music ©2020 www.davidcassel.com

All music and videos recorded and mastered at Busland Motion Picture Studio on board LUL522X Mobile Art Bus. Berlin, Germany.