Acorn

Issue date: 4/11/08 Section: Arts and Leisure

Media Credit: Charlotte Hammond Kris Keyser ('08), a member of A City Heart, plays with one hand and records with the other.

If A City Heart made the final three of MTVU's Palm Centro at AT&T Battle of the Bands, it would have been members Kris Keyser ('08) and Dustin Kniffen ('08) of the University of Iowa's first live show, first show period and first time meeting one another.

Formed in early 2007, A City Heart was essentially a creative merging of fans. Keyser became infatuated with Kniffen's band Ely Falls, and the two began discussing and sharing music via AOL Instant Messenger.

"I remember just sending Dustin a music file I had created on Reason [composition software]," Keyser said. "And he replied 'I wish I could lay some vocals over this,' and it sort of went from there." With a sound that aims for The Postal Service and also incorporates chip-tune Nintendo-esque bleeps, A City Heart is a departure from the traditional "man and his guitar," as Keyser puts it, and into an increasingly popular genre of music created between "a man and his laptop." After proliferating enough sample tracks to move past MySpace, and Keyser's accomplishment of getting A City Heart on iTunes, Keyser decided to join his on-campus peers by getting the band an MTVU Best Music on Campus profile.

Best Music on Campus allows bands to create pages with pouting band photos, bios and sample tracks. Just like MySpace, fans and friends can leave their undying affection, and link to other similar bands profiled in an adjacent sidebar. Unlike MySpace, Best Music on Campus offers mentoring and exposure that the self-actualizing realms of MySpace pages cannot. Within weeks of creating their profile, A City Heart was featured as Best Music on Campus' Artist of the Week.

Selected among the Battle of the Band's top 25 groups, A City Heart survived to make into the top 10. Then Keyser and Kniffen had to brace themselves for both the ecstasy and challenge that being selected for the top three would pose. The Campus Invasion Music Festival consists of three shows taking place at the University of Massachusetts, Boston University, University of Maryland, College Park and Penn's Landing Festival in Philadelphia, Pa.-all of which would require Kniffen to fly himself and his equipment out from Iowa to the East Coast on his own dollar. This would also oblige A City Heart to actually set up and practice together for the first time and figure out their first live lineup. However, it is this unique music-making situation that was appealing to Keyser.

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