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I've been hooked on music since I took drum lessons as a kid. To me it's an endless mystery, one I'm no closer to comprehending now than when I first pondered how Ringo got that sound.

I was an early adopter of multitrack recording and computer based audio, which has freed me for the last four decades to follow my curiosity, and that alone. This page has some highpoints along that journey.

Electronic Music
Futures 1-4
4 album set
2020-2026
Futures is the offspring of my obsession with live electronic music, after having made only strict studio recordings for decades. It's about 80% from my Elektron AnalogKeys synthesizer, and all tracks are based on the live manipulation techniques it gives me. A lot of this music began as live videos, which you can see in the Video section below.
It all started when my older brother Doug needed a bassist for his bluegrass band. "You are my new bass player" he told me. "I can't play bass" I said. "Then fake it!"

From there I learned guitar a bit, dusted off my drums and embarked on a new journey. The intent was to put together a band, which never quite happened. But I did get some nice "demo recordings" and some decent songs out of it.

My journey starts here, the first music I recorded was ambient (more or less!). It's in everything I do, all of it.

But that said I haven't made a lot of pure ambient music. I write songs, everything is a song at heart so there's no drone music here. But ambient is a highly adaptable concept, as anyone who's watched the term embrace more and more things over the years can attest.

Live Synthesizer
I've had a fraught relationship with live performance as long as I've been into music. On the one hand, a great live show is a true experience, not like anything else. But there's a whole side to music and listening that only happens with recordings. And electronic music was a real technical hassle in early days.
All that kept me in the studio, until 2015 or so when I relaized I could run a whole set on a MacBook. That bascially makes the technical stuff go away so my curiosity was triggered. Obsession ensued.
Fast-forward to today and I'm performing locally, but more importantly, the whole process has made my music making a different animal. It all starts now as live improv, which the computer makes possible to carve up and finalize.
Techno-Ambient / IDM
Around 1990 was a sad time in electronic music to me. Synths has given way to Samplers, and Ambient had turned to New Age and was taking on an unpleasant rotting smell.

Then a blast of fresh air came from over the Atlantic, as so often before, and turned things around. Enter the Techno-Ambient era, or whatever you want to call it. It brought back the Synths, it brought back the Space, and it brought in the Groove, which hadn't been there before.

It was an immemse opening of possibility that captured my imagination for 10 years and produced some of my best work.

This music was all released under the name of Psychotropic.

Fourth World is Jon Hassell's coinage for the merging of world music styles through modern recording technology. At least that's how I define it!

This emerged about the time I graduated high school, 1982. Hassell was getting some attention and I heard a radio interview with him that fascinated me.

I had been listening to world music for years already. Japanese, Indonesian, Persian and African music was on LP at my local library, on the Nonsuch label mostly. So I was primed for Hassell's innovations.

The notion of blending through technology all possible musical sounds has been core to the music I've done at every stage for the last 40 years.

And lastly, we come to my current phase and obsession. It started when I was listening to Yoshimatsu's Left Hand Piano Concerto on YouTube. After it finished I went to see what orchestra had been performing, and it turned out it was a digital Midi mock up with orchestral samples. I hadn't even noticed! Well, then, that means it's good enough for me to use too.

Before I bought my first recording equipment to make my own music, I had thought about studying composition. But I gave that up when I met a Peabody student composer at a party in Baltimore. He told me he'd never heard any of his music performed and never expected to. I didn't know that was the norm then (and now) so it came as quite a shock. Hence the move to home recording and freedom.

Many years of music technology evolution on, that is no longer the case. And so I think this new classical language that has opened up for me will keep me busy for a while.

In progress now are: Symphonies 2 and 3, a Nocturne for orchestra and a Piano Concerto. Stay tuned!

Video
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