East River Pipe is the guise of singer/songwriter
F.M. Cornog, who began recording his melancholy one-man pop on a Tascam 388 mini-studio in his apartment in Astoria, NY. Born in Suffolk, VA, and raised in Summit, NJ,
Cornog followed a difficult childhood with a series of jobs in a carpet warehouse, a greenhouse, and a light bulb factory. After a longstanding bout with alcoholism and an emotional breakdown cost him his job and left him homeless,
Cornog hit rock bottom; while sleeping in a Hoboken train station, he met
Barbara Powers, who eventually became not only his girlfriend but also set up the aspiring musician with recording equipment and his own label, Hell Gate.
Fatalistically dubbing the project
East River Pipe after imagining a connection between his music and the raw sewage dumped into a local river basin,
Cornog began issuing home-recorded cassettes like 1990's Point of Memory and the following year's I Used to Be Kid Colgate before he and
Powers raised enough capital to press several hundred copies of a single,
Helmet On. After the record won Single of the Week honors in Melody Maker,
East River Pipe was signed to the legendary British independent label Sarah Records, which collected much of
Cornog's previously recorded material on 1994's
Shining Hours in a Can.
After signing to the American indie Merge,
East River Pipe returned in 1995 with
Poor Fricky;
Mel followed in 1996, trailed three years later by
The Gasoline Age. Four years after
Cornog's return to New Jersey (and the subsequent release of
The Gasoline Age),
East River Pipe released
Garbageheads on Endless Stun in 2003, and 2005 saw the release of
What Are You On? -- still on Merge.
Cornog's seventh album under the
East River Pipe moniker, We Live in Rented Rooms, arrived in 2011.
–
Jason Ankeny, Rovi