Felix Danilo Releases ‘The Territories West’ on September 8

Felix Danilo, a young, independent musician based in Wellington, has never been one to be shackled to a genre. He is just as comfortable playing rock and metal as he is composing ambient soundtracks or sidestepping into middle eastern dance music. He goes wherever the mood and current inspiration takes him, and his latest work steered him in a very unexpected direction. 

“Years ago, I was jamming with friends and played around with a western-style refrain. It was such fun to play that it stuck in my head and kept sneaking back in. Eventually I recreated and recorded it for myself, and found loads more ideas sitting right behind it. Enough to make an album with.” 

With new, 12-track album, The Territories West, Felix Danilo invites the listener on a journey through the wide, evocative landscapes of the Midwest. Primarily using guitar, the mood switches from wistful melancholy to pure joy and back again. The haunting Heartlands tells a story of a lover left behind. A rhythmic thrum in Nowhere Left to Run recalls the gallop of horses across the desert, and the defiant amble of By His Father’s Grave becomes the stroll of an outlaw down a main street, telling a tale of revenge. Other soundscapes evoke arid plains and sweeping ranges where wolves roam, where lonely cowboys ride under a stream of bright stars, where spells are cast over crackling campfires, and where nothing is quite as it seems. This is a truly beautiful album to take you far away to another place in a different time.

In Heartlands, By His Father’s Grave and Bang Bang (a cover of the original by Sonny Bono and Cher), vocalists Nicole Obren and Kayla McGee weave stories through the album to elevate and enhance the western theme. 

“Felix Danilo’s inventive compositions are fabulous examples of how to use some fairly ‘out-there’ harmonic ideas to enhance the music and overall effectiveness of the songs. He seems to effortlessly transfer jazz and classical theory over to the pop/rock world.” – Muzic.net.nz

“SkeletonCrew’s It’s Better I Don’t Know… is a gorgeous layered journey of sounds, a parade of musical elements that enliven the ears and go beyond the conventional structures of music.” – Divide and Conquer Music (from work in a previous project ‘SkeletonCrew’)