Jason Allen was born in Port Pirie, South Australia on September 2nd, 1975. He started playing guitar at age 8 and began writing and recording music at 15. After high school, Jason moved to Adelaide to study music at Adelaide University’s Elder Conservatorium. During the three years of study towards his Bachelor Degree in Music, Jason wrote experimental works and was a co‑director of Adelaide’s ACME New Music Co., a composer’s collective that put on dozens of concerts every year featuring new works by its members and international composers.
After graduating, he relocated to Melbourne in 1996 to undertake a Graduate Diploma in Contemporary Music Technology at Latrobe University. Studying studio technique, synthesis and audio engineering, it was during this time that Jason started writing and recording his own songs, influenced in style by David Bowie, My Bloody Valentine, Underworld and Blur. It was also during this time that Jason started working as a sound technician, mainly at Melbourne’s Victorian Arts Centre. Over the next 5 years, he would mix everything from opera and ballet to visiting international artists and local bands, honing the technical skills he would need to record, mix and master his own albums.
In September 2002, Jason and his wife Jill were expatriated to Bern, Switzerland, to fulfil a three-year contract with Jill’s employer. Jason set up his “home studio” (an ordinary PC, a mixing desk the size of a paperback and one cheap microphone) in their apartment and concentrated solely on writing and recording.
After more than 18 months of writing, recording and trialling material on his friends via the Internet, he released his self-titled debut Alternative Pop album on Cafepress.com in November 2004. It earned extensive airplay on Australian independent radio, 44 Reviewer's Pick awards from Garageband.com and was picked up on a non-exclusive basis by American independent record company Open Heart Records. It is available on iTunes in all territories except Japan and Australia. "An Eloquent Testimony" and “Early Morning Wake-Up Call” are also available for sale as downloads from indienetunes.com
Encouraged by the success of his first album, Jason sought to stretch himself by attempting something completely different for his second. Writing under the name The Vorstand Circus, (taken from Peter Carey's book "The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith"), Jason's made his first forays into personal, confessional song writing; an attempt to open old emotional wounds and try to capture them on an album. It also saw Jason challenge himself to synthesise the sound of a real band on a cheap PC, limiting himself to the tonal palette of piano, accordion, guitar, bass and drums. The result is The Vorstand Circus’s debut album "Sworn In On A Stack Of Dictionaries", written, performed, recorded, mixed and mastered entirely by Jason Allen. A continuous 51 minute opus brooding on the themes of xenophobia and fear, the album simultaneously exorcises the traumas experienced with an old friend in a surreal, exaggerated language rich in disturbing imagery.
On returning to Australia in October 2005, Jason entered the album in the inaugural Australian Music Prize 2005. “Sworn In On A Stack Of Dictionaries” made the “longlist”: the final 20 albums in consideration for the award.