Noah Charney

Music

Novelist, art historian, and historian of art crime, Noah Charney began his creative career writing music and lyrics, before he turned to playwrighting and eventually to novels.

From 1999-2002 he wrote the music and lyrics, sang, and played guitar for a punk band called The Jump Into. They recorded an album called "Know You Said All" during study breaks in their dorm rooms on a Tascam digital 8-track, with surprisingly good-quality results, considering most of the tracks were recorded in the early morning hours, with some attempt not to disturb the sleeping residents around them. A compilation album of the best of The Jump Into is available for purchase here.

When Noah moved to Europe in 2002, the punk band went their separate ways. Noah began to write and record solo acoustic music, with the passion of the punk music which has always been his true love, and with a delicacy of the more complex emo and folk music better suited to an acoustic guitar and voice alone. He began to record and perform casually, under the name Seraph.

As Seraph, Noah recorded several complete albums and apocrypha, a total of nearly 100 songs, all on the Tascam. He preferred the intimacy of these homemade recordings, in the atmospheric vein of Springsteen's "Nebraska," to professional studio recordings. Seraph has recorded three albums to date. "This Machine Heals Broken Hearts" (2003), "For the Fallen" (2004), and "Songs of Rage and Love" (2006).

Each album has an overarching theme to it. While not a fan of concept albums, Noah thinks that a good rock album should contain one or more clear thoughts, messages that one leaves with, when one listens to the album from beginning to end. The best albums are not collections of singles, but function like the best books of short stories or poems--a vein links the various parts to an overall idea.

"This Machine Heals Broken Hearts" shows the arc of the end of one relationship and the hope of a new one. It may be listened to simply for pleasure, or as a soothing balm after a relationship has freshly ended. It features hit singles in "Stars Will Fall" and "Illuminate" and Noah's favorite song of those that he wrote, "New Moon Rising."

"For the Fallen" is an album of elegies, songs that describe the variety of reactions to the death of a loved one. As with "This Machine..." it may be listened to for pleasure, or may be found therapeutic, to listen to after a loved one has passed.

Two of the acoustic albums plus The Jump Into will be available through Noah's music page on MySpace (www.myspace.com/noahseraph) using SNOCAP download technology (it functions just like iTunes). Complete lyrics and album art are available as a free download here.

All profits from the sale of Noah's music, as Seraph and as The Jump Into, go directly to support ARCA (The Association for Research into Crimes against Art), the anti-art crime charity that Noah has founded. Thank you for listening, and we hope that you enjoy!

All profits from the sale of Noah’s music go to support ARCA, the non-profit think tank which Noah founded to fight against art crime.

For more information on Noah’s charity, go to www.artcrime.info.