…with Uncanned Music founder Scottie McNiece.

*from my personal archive: Uncanned Music exists!*

In the Summer of 2012, using my Aunt Donna’s home address, I registered Uncanned Music LLC with the State of Indiana (supposedly it was cheaper or better than filing in Illinois, according to my very misguided attorney at the time, which proved to be hilariously wrong). For the previous two years I had been working for Brendan Sodikoff (at what became Hogsalt Hospitality), a tenure that began at his first restaurant Gilt Bar, where I got a job as a food runner because my old buddy from Indiana, Owen Gibler, bartended there and stuck his neck out for the greasy-haired rocker I was back at age 24 (Owen was beloved by Brendan, really FOH management across the board, and got them to hire me despite my lack of meaningful experience). By the end of my two year tenure, I had moved up the chain from food runner to full time “Music Curator,” a salary position Brendan created for me that really didn’t have any structure or finite expectations (beyond ‘make sure the music sounds good’), but enjoyed all the privileges of being a director-level employee of his company. Doing that job for him and participating in the success of his first few restaurants earned me a reputation in the Chicago restaurant scene that quickly had other places asking me to ‘curate’ music for them as well. So I eventually left that ‘dream job’ and followed the pain-filled path of small business ownership.

Working for Brendan in the pre-Uncanned days… he was very generous with me. He was concerned in general with embracing talented people who worked in his restaurants, wanting to nurture their skills and passions in ways that were creatively fulfilling (for him as much as them). The gift I once told Brendan he had (and the title I put on a business card that I would one day letter-press for him) was: “Talent Prism.” He could take a very simple, unidirectional beam of talent and rainbow it out into a vast spectrum of abilities. I had only been food running for a couple months and barely knew him when he said to me “I heard you’re a musician.. Maybe you want to help with the playlist here?” I remember how he said it: in a way that felt full of opportunity. In those early days, I was a food runner at Gilt Bar by night, but went to college classes at National Louis University by day. I had burned myself out of trying to be a full time musician (which I went pretty hard on between 2004-2010), and decided I was going to try to finally get a college degree. I wanted to shift gears and become a teacher. So I was a bit closed off to Brendan’s invitation…. at first.

*I still have my music notes from the upstairs dining room of Gilt Bar, where I was a foodrunner, and where I first started ‘curating’ playlists.*

After a couple more inviting prods from Brendan, I did start tinkering with the playlists. I had been a busser, host, cashier, or server in various restaurants going back to age 16, but I’d say Gilt Bar was clearly the first ‘legit’ restaurant I ever worked at. It was in the peak days of the “Gastropub” boom, where all sorts of brilliant food and bev people were taking somewhat scientific, very academic approaches to their jobs. It was very inspiring for me at the time. And it informed my approach to the music.

*Gilt Bar upstairs dining room playlist notes*

I had a research assignment for one of my classes at National Louis and I decided to use the opportunity to write a paper: “Exploration of Musical Effect on Restaurant Patrons and Consumer Behavior.” I read all the studies that I could find, read books by Oliver Sacks and Daniel Levitin about music and psychology, and applied everything I learned as a musician, producer and self-taught sound recorder to start formulating my own pseudo-scientific theories about how music in restaurants can be optimized. I started not only curating new music for Gilt Bar but also ‘mastering’ the playlists; I tried to make the ‘music program’ feel and flow more like one really long compilation album. I took exhaustive notes on how the music felt at every moment of every service.

*If anybody wants to read this self-serving stack of swivel-eyed pseudo-science, HMU, I’ll send it to you :)*

*Some more legit scientific research that you should probably read instead lol… or I can give you the abstract, I read all this BS!*

My coworkers seemed to like my taste in music in general, and it really isn’t hard to convince a creative person that music is important… so not long after I started going hard on this idea of ‘curating’ music, Brendan starting showering me with praise. More importantly, he started putting money in my pocket. Then he started saying things like “lets start a music consultancy business together.” That was a major motivation for me. I immediately started drifting away from my college classes. After two trimesters, I dropped out (again). I started tinkering with the concepts for the business and came up with a name. I still remember the day I sat next to Brendan, stoned out of my mind on the couches at Gilt Bar, and told him I wanted to call the business “Uncanned Music.” He was stoked, and immediately reached to buy the web domain uncannedmusic.com.

*At the time I thought a good music program should be summed up in 11 songs, like a great film soundtrack, even if eclectic.*

It was around that time that I became close with one of my FOH coworkers, Joe Darling. Joe was pretty amped on all I was trying to do in the music department, and we bonded over our respective tastes in music. We started bringing in our records to DJ for each other during shifts in Gilt Bar’s basement lounge Curio. Joe was bringing a record that blew my mind into work pretty much daily, and his selections started bearing heavily into my Gilt Bar playlists. It was also around that time that Brendan opened his second restaurant, Maude’s Liquor Bar. The place was a punky French concept and I immediately thought of the music taste of an old friend, David Allen. David was a musician and recording engineer who I got to know intimately when his band and mine shared a van on a two-month tour of the US in Summer 2010 (the very same tour that made me think “this is hell, maybe I don’t want to be a musician, maybe I should just go to college and try to become a teacher…” lol). I invited him to contribute, and David hooked me up with a bunch of torrent ripped mp3s, and a box of 45s he’d picked up from record stores while on tour in France. The opening playlist at Maude’s was, for me, probably the most personal playlist I ever made; and it was made even more impactful by heavy dashes of David’s French Ye-Ye and No Wave selections peppered throughout. Not long after, I started sharing the monthly ‘music curator’ pay that Brendan gave me with David and Joe. Through our hangs and work together, I saw their creativity and passions for music appreciation became as activated as mine had, inspired by the ambitions and cultural pursuits of Brendan and core of creative people he’d surrounded himself with at Hogsalt.

*Early drawing of my reel-to-reel back-bar concept, sketched on the back of a large format beer study guide for Maude’s, made by Hogsalt bev director Jean Tomaro.*

Brendan opened another little place, Doughnut Vault, as we started work on another place (what would become “Bavettes”). While we worked on Bavettes, he signed the lease on another place. It was 800 W Randolph - what would become Au Cheval - and he said he wanted to open it even sooner (in just a few months). He also started floating the idea that we could open a music listening bar together, possibly in the basement of Bavette’s. Naturally I was enticed by that. He had me bartending in all his places, and doing music for all of them. Sitting in beverage meetings, learning about trappist beers, new cocktail menus, and wines of the day… I started making drawings for what I wanted my listening bar to look like. I wanted to use reel-to-reel tape decks. For hi-fi playback, sure, but really most importantly just to make the music program more visual and undeniable, feel more alive in the space.

*Tracklist for the first tape reel I recorded… at first I was doing full sides of vinyl, recording during my shifts in the Gilt Bar’s downstairs lounge Curio.* *The star denoting a “request” is likely because I used to create a vinyl menu before shifts at Curio, that customers could order from… More on the vinyl menu later in Uncanned 11.*

I used Au Cheval as a test ground for the reel-to-reel concept… I still remember the look on Brendan’s face when I walked into the restaurant with a TEAC tape machine.. he looked confused and terrified when I told him “this is our music program.” Kudos to him for not shooting it down! Au Cheval is still using that same machine today (which I never actually sold to them, so maybe I should go pick it up sometime lol). They’ve probably run atleast 50,000 hours of analog tape to date. It’s one of the signature elements of that establishment, which has become a certified Chicago institution.

*My brain steadily splitting between what I needed to do for Hogsalt and what I needed to do to build Uncanned into an independent music consultancy.*

It was all very exciting, but in the meantime, the more Brendan’s burgeoning restaurant group became an all-consuming reality, the dream of starting a business with him that did music curation for OTHER restaurant groups felt more and more like a conflict of interest. After the immediate success of Au Cheval… those other restaurants came knocking quick, and when I told Brendan I thought it was time to start that side business and do this work for others… he kind of had a melt down. He fired me, pretty dramatically… But when I came in the next morning to sign my papers, he asked me if I’d please stay on. I said “of course, but I’d like to also pursue this business.” He obliged, but it was obvious we were already moving in different directions; and we’d already inflicted pretty irreversible damage on each other. I was hurt that my mentor – a person who had not only inspired me, but nurtured my blossoming talent with their ideas, time and resources – was trying to block me. He was hurt that I had not reciprocated his incredibly generous and malleable support with loyalty, or atleast a genuine desire to prioritize his interests over mine. It was his interests, after all, that made so much of it possible. Definitely easier for me to see that in retrospect.

One of two trademarks I filed back in 2012… the copyright to the words “uncanned music,” attached to the meaning: “custom music programming for others.” The other copyright is for our LIFE\SOUND\TRACKS logo.

I continued working for Brendan through the opening of Bavette’s, but through that process we had a series of difficult interactions and clashes. Trust was pretty eroded on both sides, and I realized I needed to protect myself in order to truly go out on my own. My Uncles Peter and Mark saved the day, loaning me the cash I needed to pay Brendan for all the costs he claimed to have incurred in the development of Uncanned. In doing so, I got him to sign a document releasing any common law rights he may have acquired to anything related to Uncanned, so I could establish the business with no entanglements and no worries about future issues. He did so, understandably, begrudgingly. But he did. And I went forward with the LLC and trademark filings the next day.

Our Story Begins