Kinjac Biography

Born and raised in Asheville, NC to a semi-notorious metaphysical minister and a new age musician, multi-instrumentalist/producer Michael O’Shea now goes by the name of Kinjac. The story is as follows: Half-way through a philosophy degree and a certain president’s second term, Kinjac developed a case of wanderlust and left the country for a semester in Edinburgh, Scotland. Soon growing tired of bagpipes, he traveled through Europe and finally China until he longed to finally return to his motherland to study politics.

Unfortunately, Kinjac’s genetic disposition had another path in mind. His great-uncle was Dr. I.G. Greer, one of the first nationally recognized authorities on mountain folk music, and Kinjac would eventually realize that he was hereditarily doomed to a life in service of the muse from all sides of his family. A month into a poly-sci degree, he met an auspicious female painter, had a mental breakdown, withdrew from all his classes, bought a new drum set with the refund check, and set off for Chapel Hill, NC to pursue the siren of sound. A long month passed and he decided things were not moving fast enough, so he returned west to the Appalachian mountains of his birth to continue his philosophy education and learn how to produce his own music at his own pace.

Kinjac became a hermit to the outside world and to other musicians, toiling away alone in the studio he had created in a bedroom of a small stone house far from people or cell-phone reception. It was there he took the moniker of Kinjac for his musical alter-ego and expanded his musical repertoire beyond percussion to include all aspects of music, from writing to recording to producing to mastering. Five months later he emerged from his hermitage victorious with his first full-length album, “the upside of down,” packaged in a unique booklet full of his own photographs that correspond to each song on the album.

Fresh off a semester of scholarly research and full of new ideas that were in dire need of digesting, Kinjac quickly returned to his studio and begin work on a new project to serve as an outlet for his philosophizing on the political times, deconstructionism and his own personal history. He set out to create a rough musical roadmap of the past seven years, both for himself personally and for his milieu. Written, recorded and produced at a feverish pace, “Seven Years Bad Luck,” his second full-length attempt, went from conception to completion in a single month and, inspired by the historic political times, Kinjac self-released “Seven Years Bad Luck” on Inauguration Day (January 20, 2009).

After some time for self-analysis, Kinjac observes “My music is an amalgamation of various disparate musical influences creating a corpus of sound that is itself unique. The tension between binaries can be felt on every track. My rural, natural setting clashes with the encroaching urban sprawl; my love of home clashes with a longing for the synthetic cities I had grown accustomed to in my travels; my minimalist melodies clash with a din of digitized percussion. I am striving to deconstruct the ‘song’ and reconstruct it in a new light, and my licentious approach has come to fruition as a kind of musical gestalt that is more than the mere sum of influences.”

Kinjac’s live show is a unique phenomenon befitting his music. The multi-instrumentalist switches between singing and playing bass (with an often radically alterted sound) and playing a drum-set, all on-top of the densely layered sonic backdrop of his pre-recording productions. Kinjac has shared the stage with notable names such as L.A.  producer/musician Thavius Beck, L.A. based hip-hop artist K-the-I???, and New York Folk/Metal band O’Death, as well as having headlined venues such as The Rocket Club and The Emerald Lounge in his hometown of Asheville, NC.