Someplace within the haze between the fuzz of an outdated VHS tape and the hyper-sheen of a TikTok account is the place 25-year-old musician Spilly Cave exists.
Born as Billy Cave till the school nickname “Spilly” took maintain, Cave has been performing music in and across the central Pennsylvania area since his pre-teen years. In late October, Cave launched the eponymous “Spilly Cave” album, which isn’t technically his debut – that may be 2019’s “Winter” – however nonetheless appears like a coronation.
Written, recorded, combined and mastered by Cave himself, the 17-track “Spilly Cave” is brimming with tasty grooves and shimmering riffs.
“For myself, I create bizarre deadlines that haven’t any precise, bodily reference,” Cave, a Harrisburg native, says over the cellphone. “I simply inform myself, ‘it needs to be completed at this level.’ I am going to suppose it is completed after which have 20 different concepts.”
Cave credit his ever-burgeoning TikTok account, which has garnered over one million views up to now three years, together with his success to this point. After beginning the account in 2019 with the common fare, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 allowed him the time to create as much as three movies a day, flexing a number of inventive muscular tissues directly.
“What’s been fascinating to me is sort of having my first success be by means of an web lens,” Cave says. “However then, what I am actually excited for folks to see, is like ‘Oh my god, go see this man, he has tons of expertise and the band is tremendous tight.'”
At the start of 2022, Cave says that he upped the manufacturing worth on his movies and started utilizing it extra formally as a springboard for concepts for the “Spilly Cave” album. Movies typically start with a non-sequitur (“Dude, Ayn Rand may by no means!” begins one from September), earlier than launching right into a condensed, algorithm-approved part of a track with Cave performing flurried guitar and bass strains towards a blue sky background.
These movies attracted the eye of “The World’s Busiest Music Critic” Anthony Fantano, who stated that Caves’ “vibes are immaculate.” Cave says that the shoutout garnered him an additional 4,000 followers alone.
“Spilly Cave” the album is excess of simply vibes, although – beneath the lo-fi aesthetic that recollects “Grownup Swim” bumper music is an actual knack for composition, which Cave credit to his time at New York Metropolis’s The New College and a lifelong appreciation for online game soundtracks.
“I am actually obsessive about video video games and online game music, that is why I named the primary track on the album ‘Blood Gulch’ (a degree from the 2001 recreation ‘Halo: Fight Advanced’),” Cave says. “All of the ‘Remaining Fantasy’ music, all of the Nintendo stuff, Inon Zur, who did the ‘Fallout’ soundtrack and this recreation ‘Lord of the Rings: Warfare within the North,’ which was tremendous influential to me. For me, online game music was a giant a part of me desirous to be a composer.”
This previous summer season’s Tellus3City Pageant marked the official debut of the total band model of Spilly Cave, rounded out by drummer Logan Bedard, bassist Michael Kleine (also called “Animal Wolf”) and guitarist – and Cave’s youthful brother – Phillip Cave. After their Tellus360 gig, the band will fly to the West Coast for 2 exhibits in Los Angeles, which Cave is hoping will result in a full-blown east coast tour in 2023.
After getting this far independently, Cave has slowly begun taking label conferences, all of the whereas repping the place he got here from, to the web and past.
“I like Central Pennsylvania, I like this space,” Cave says. “So, it is fascinating in these conferences, as a result of everybody assumes you are from New York or LA when you have any modicum of success. So I’ve had these conferences with labels and different folks the place they’re like, ‘So, you are in New York proper? Philadelphia?’ No dude, Central PA. ‘Mainly Philly, proper?’ Truly, probably not.”
