email: alphaleonis@alphaleonis.org

Planet Ceres Enterprises
4110 SE Hawthorne Blvd., #619
Portland, OR 97214-5246

Press Photo (.jpg)
Bio (.pdf)


Like many contemporary art projects, Alpha Leonis began in a crowded college apartment, where a young Atticus Reynard first began recording the melodic thoughts that had previously been confined to his curious hominid cerebrum. These first recordings, crude and primitive skeletons at best, were initially intended only for personal use and evaluation, but gradually made their way into the hands of a few close friends and family members who encouraged Atticus to continue his new hobby. Over the next few years amid a variety of internships, jobs, extended world travel, and personal pursuits, Atticus slowly began amassing a collection of recordings with only the distant intention of one day releasing an album. Finally, in 2009, more than six years after those first, primordial explorations into the world of recorded sounds, he decided to fully commit himself to the idea of publicly releasing his work.

In developing the ideas that comprise Shadows of Men, Atticus sought to create a world through music that was revealed through its intimate details, with a literate foundation of powerful imagery and metaphorical layering that would continue to present new perspectives on each repeated listen. As he experimented with different styles and textures, he gravitated toward a sound that he imagined would vaguely represent the dystopian near futures depicted in popular science fiction by blending elements of the familiar with a retro, pre-digital age vision – as if creating an operatic rock version of Blade Runner. As a result, spacey, swirling synthesized sounds seamlessly coexist on the album along with acoustic guitars and anthemic choruses that spiral toward a well-coordinated illusion of universal sonic chaos and collapse.

The collection of songs that comprised the basis for the Shadows of Men all started with the opening track on the album, the aptly themed “Erasing Me”, originally recorded in 2005. But it wasn't until 2008 that Atticus began to compose the bulk of the album, and sifted through his collection of demos and notes to rework earlier tracks like “Erasing Me”, “How to Throw Knives” and “Lunar Lullaby”. In the summer of 2009, in a sweltering garage just outside of Los Angeles, Atticus wrote a flurry of new songs and gradually refined the specifics of the album before moving up to Portland, Oregon where he completed it. He then founded a record label, Planet Ceres Enterprises, and set out to find a group of talented and impassioned musicians with whom to perform. Currently, Alpha Leonis is playing their original brand of spacey indie rock throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Alpha Leonis Etymology (Simplified )
Alpha Leonis - Regulus - COR LEONIS - King Richard - COR CONDITVM - La cathdrale de Rouen - "HIC COR CONDITVM EST RICARDI ANGLORVM REGIS QVI COR LEONIS DICTUS OBIIT AN M C XC IX"