Biography
Since an early age Leon played and experimented with music and musical textures. His first original recording was a short composition that he made with one of his best friends when they were very young. They named it “A can’s odyssey.” it was, by all means, amateurish, but it showed enough creativity to impress their families and friends. The piece had only two instruments (flute and bongos) and a background recording of a soda can being tossed and crushed around. The little song was the starting point for Leon’s musical adventures.
The electronic era enhanced by the music of Tangerine Dreams, Tomita and Mike Oldfield brought new sounds to the scene. A couple of years later and with the acquisition of two mini-Moog synthesizers and a Syndrum® pad, the duo recorded more original music. This time around, the material was more cohesive and had a more polished finish to it. Leon remembers, “The hardest thing was transforming my friend’s room into a studio because we only had a reel-to-reel recorder with two microphones attached to it. We had to record everything on one take, and then play it back through a separate amp and record on top of it using the mike. Somehow it worked out all right. I think there was a hunger on us, a hunger about making music which drove us to make things work no matter what the circumstances were.”
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After moving to the United States, Leon got involved in several jam sessions with various musicians and friends but always found the compromising of musical ideas to be very constraining. “It was a fun thing,” he recalls, “Sometimes I’d be in a studio jamming with one bass player who liked punk rock, a guitar player that liked big band, and I, with my taste in progressive rock playing the drums.”
The advent and advancements in personal computing finally allowed him to make music while overseeing all aspects of its creation. Recording became something that happened more often and Leon made the best of the opportunity to learn about making an album. He got to meet some of his collaborators by networking through the internet. Technically, some of the work for “Leon PLays Genesis” was done in Brazil with the majority done at Leon’s studio in the U.S. It is an interesting set of working dynamics, although he concedes that it may not be the most appropriate for every recording task. “Personally, it is a perfect way for someone like me to work,” he explains, “With a regular nine-to-five job, a child in college, another in high-school and a new baby, my time gets very short and I often end up working until very late at night.. Plus, I am a very bad live musician, I need some way to correct my mistakes as I go along and the computer certainly creates the opportunity for me to do just that.”
When not making music, Leon is an award-winning designer and illustrator who creates designs for some of the world’s most respected consumer companies. He also has created album covers and concert tour posters for several bands such as Jethro Tull, Roger Waters, Phil Collins, King’s X and Yes among others.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.