OTHERLANDS: A Global Music Exploration

Otherlands: A Global Music Exploration is a project from GRAMMY-nominated 5-string American fiddler Casey Driessen. Produced, performed, recorded and filmed by Driessen, Otherlands is a travelogue of on-location recordings, short films, and essays documenting musical collaborations around the world, with Spain, Ireland, Scotland, India, Japan, Finland, Italy, Czech Republic, and Slovakia visited to date.

The first six stops were part of a nearly year-long journey taken with his family before they found themselves in a small cabin in Finland during the first Covid-19 lockdown. The results of this journey are a 26-episode video series, a 13-song recording of collaborations titled Otherlands:ONE, stories from each encounter, and hundreds of photos. While that first adventure may have ended, the project continues.

PRESS:
"Worldly musical delights." - NPR Weekend Edition

"Driessen pours all he's seen into this instrument; the result is both breathtaking and transformative." - Rolling Stone

"Knee-to-knee with his musical peers, in their homes, their studios, their local pubs, he learned new sounds, new rhythms, and new ways of collaborating...a multi-sensory experience." - No Depression

Before setting off on his Otherlands adventure, Driessen spent four years as Program Director of the Contemporary Performance (Production Concentration) master’s degree at Berklee College of Music’s first international campus in Valencia, Spain. While working in Valencia, Casey released The Chop Notation Project. Developed in partnership with Spanish violinist Oriol Saña, this free resource creates standardized music notation to read and write the percussive bowed string technique known as chopping.

In the fall of 2024, Driessen will launch the Blue Ridge Fiddle Camp at the Brevard Music Center in Brevard, North Carolina. For fiddlers & violinists of all styles, this four day experience will celebrate the development of one’s musical voice through the exploration of style, rhythm, and technology under the guidance of a world-class faculty.

Over the past 14 years, Driessen has released four solo records and toured as a one-man live looping show called The Singularity; collaborated with Béla Fleck, Bassekou Kouyate, Abigail Washburn, Darrell Scott, Rina Das Baul, Jerry Douglas, Raghu Dixit, Steve Earle and others; produced and engineered records; teched, managed stages, tours, and merch; and travelled the world playing music in 22 countries on four continents and counting...all while wearing red shoes.