Lee J. Landey: LA-based writer, musician, and composer fusing avant-rock, industrial sound, surreal fiction, and bold storytelling.
Lee J. Landey doesn’t just play bass, he summons low-frequency landscapes that rattle ribcages. As the bassist of the avant-rock group Wand for nearly a decade, he toured through countless cities, delivering performances that blurred the edges between psychedelic chaos and hypnotic precision. Over the years, the band released six albums that carved a distinctive mark in the underground rock scene, each project brimming with inventive textures and fearless experimentation.
While many would have been content riding that momentum, Lee’s creative appetite demanded more. Enter Oil Thief, his solo industrial venture, a project that transforms mechanical rhythms, shadowy drones, and raw noise into sonic tapestries. These aren’t tracks you simply listen to; they’re environments you step into. Dark, labyrinthine, and often unsettling, Oil Thief’s music feels like the pulse of a rusted city coming back to life.
Then, a pivot, one that revealed Lee’s other artistic face. In 2020, he released The Long Morning, his debut collection of short fiction. These stories fuse the strange and the familiar: paranoid science fiction, fractured noir, space-bound horror, and reimagined historical events. The tone is surreal yet grounded, as if each page were lit by flickering neon in a dream you can’t fully wake from. To deepen the immersion, he paired the book with an original CD of music, each track composed to mirror and magnify the emotional resonance of the stories. The result was not just a book, but a multi-sensory experience.
What You'll Discover:
Architect of Atmosphere
At his core, Lee is a composer, songwriter, and sound designer based in Los Angeles. His skill set stretches far beyond the stage, encompassing music for podcasts, short films, video games, and other digital media. His compositions aren’t just background scores, they’re story elements in themselves, engineered to pull the audience deeper into the narrative.
Lee’s musical language thrives on texture. It’s about layering tones until they breathe, about designing sounds that feel like they’ve lived through something. From whispering synth pads that carry a hint of menace to bass lines that walk like giants in the dark, every element feels purposeful.
On the page, his fiction works much the same way. Stories unfold like soundscapes, beats rise and fall, pacing shifts abruptly, silences become as significant as the words themselves. In The Long Morning, one story might strand you with a cosmic vagabond drifting between planets, while the next traps you in a home whose walls seem to bend in unnatural directions. It’s all part of his ethos: the world should never feel too safe.
The Voice of a Cultural Commentator
Beyond music and fiction, Lee also writes with a journalist’s eye and an artist’s heart. His essays and reviews explore film, culture, and media with a tone that balances sharp critique and playful curiosity. He doesn’t just dissect a movie, he interrogates its world, its implications, and the emotional fingerprints it leaves on its audience.
His writing is less about verdicts and more about engaging the reader in a conversation. Even when covering the darkest corners of body horror cinema or the sweeping spectacle of a historical epic, he maintains a sense of intimacy, like a friend who insists you watch something not because it’s perfect, but because it will change the way you think.
A Creator in Three Dimensions
Lee isn’t a musician who writes on the side. He isn’t a novelist who just happens to play bass. And he isn’t a critic moonlighting as an artist. He’s all of these things, equally and simultaneously, each craft feeding the others.
When he writes music, narrative structure influences his arrangements. When he tells a story, it unfolds like a song, verses and choruses translated into plot beats and emotional swells. When he critiques a piece of art, he understands the hidden gears of its creation because he’s been inside that machine himself.
This interplay of disciplines is rare. It’s what gives his work its particular depth: a sense that the piece you’re experiencing is not a single-layer creation, but the surface of something vast beneath.
How He Works
Lee’s process is fluid but grounded in a few consistent principles:
- Experiment first, refine later – He begins by generating raw material without restraint. In music, this might be a chaotic wall of sound; in writing, a stream of dialogue or fragmented scenes. The refinement happens only after the core emotion has been captured.
- Let mediums collide – Sound inspires words, words inspire sound. Often, a musical motif will trigger the seed of a story, or a piece of dialogue will inform the mood of a score.
- Value connection over scale – He creates for impact, not algorithms. A single listener deeply affected by a track or story is more valuable to him than thousands of casual clicks.
- Select collaborations with intent – While he thrives on working with others, it’s always with those who share his appetite for the unconventional.
Why Lee J. Landey Stands Out
In a world where artists are often boxed into narrow categories, Lee breaks down those walls entirely. His projects aren’t isolated works; they’re interconnected worlds. He doesn’t just release an album, he crafts a sonic environment. He doesn’t just publish a book, he pairs it with an aural dimension that reshapes the way you read it.
What makes him unique isn’t just versatility, it’s integration. Most creators who work across mediums keep them separate. Lee fuses them into a single, cohesive identity. This approach doesn’t just make his work distinctive; it makes it immersive in a way that few others achieve.
A Moment of Relatability
Think about the last time you read a book with a playlist in the background, only to realize that the music seemed to sync with the scene as if it were written for it. Now imagine that wasn’t coincidence. Imagine the music was deliberately composed to echo the story’s tone, pacing, and emotional shifts. That’s the experience Lee designs from the ground up.
A Glimpse into the Future
With his years in Wand behind him, Lee’s next chapter is wide open. The trajectory suggests more experiments at the intersection of mediums, perhaps a novel with an accompanying score that evolves as you read, or immersive installations where story, sound, and space intertwine. It’s not hard to picture his work translating into virtual or augmented reality experiences, where each turn of the head reveals a new layer of narrative and sound.
Whatever comes next, it’s clear it will be more than just art to consume. It will be a world to enter.
Key Takings
- Interdisciplinary creator blending music, fiction, and criticism into one cohesive body of work.
- Wand years built a foundation of touring, recording, and pushing sonic boundaries.
- Oil Thief project explored industrial soundscapes as self-contained environments.
- The Long Morning demonstrated his ability to merge literary and musical storytelling into a single package.
- Sound design expertise spans podcasts, games, short films, and experimental media.
- Critical voice offers cultural commentary that is both informed and engaging.
- Unique integration of mediums ensures each work is multi-layered and immersive.
- Forward trajectory points toward even more ambitious, cross-medium creations.
