The Sound of Inspiration
By age 6, I developed a strong fascination with capturing beauty… filling sketchbooks with drawings of faces, forms, shapes, shadows, robots, spaceships, super heroes, etc. At 13 I got my first electric guitar, which became a device of intense fascination to me. So much so that I ditched art and began to develop my skills as a musician, broadening to other instruments and eventually working in a million dollar studio in college – and for several years with one famous rapper who produced my band in college. In college I gave my credit card a serious workout and built a home studio with one of the first home Pro Tools system (the 001), a pair of Behringer Truth monitors, and was lucky enough to have access to instruments, software, and fantastic microphones like the infamous Neumann u87 and KM184′s, AKG 414, and more from my school.
I also began working in Propellerheads Reason in 2001 (a lot)… and started to develop another intense fascination with electronic music… experimenting frequently. It took some years before I had my first electronic performance at Burning Man 2008 where I used a laptop and a Tenori-on under the stage name Space Frequency, or Space Freq (see http://www.spacefrequency.com). I performed along with my friend Sebastian, an incredibly talented electronic violin player, and did it in front of a giant crashed UFO art installation that I built for Burning Man (see http://www.crashedspaceship.com). The premise of this project was partly a reaction to what I consider to be a problem with innovation in music and the resulting homogenization of creative inspiration. As humans, we naturally like everything neat and defined… as artists we like to make a mess and expand organically… the latter is the process of magic making, but both are necessary reactions. People are often afraid to take risks with their music, with certain exceptions – I’m thinking mainly about Radiohead and their frequent forays into the digital realm. With most music I feel like I hear way too many of the same instruments over and over, making the same sounds with the same song structures (i.e. A-B-A-B-C-A-B), over and over again.
Earlier this year I started producing much more advanced electronic music using Ableton 8 and recently added Native Instruments Komplete 6 to my arsenal of soft synths and samples, and in November I started producing full-time. Often when I put my producers hat on and listen, I hear things so differently. I try to get inside the mind of the composer/producer, and the adventure that I’m being drawn into. I want to feel the intention, and soak up all the subtle elements that probably took him or her a few days or weeks to create. In general, I’m hearing things in electronic music right now that are just so compelling, creative, innovative, and somehow still mostly underground… Something big is on the horizon. 
Btw, I haven’t decided how I want perform these tracks, whether it’s using my CD-J’s… a laptop with Serrato, Ableton with an APC40, or a custom setup… I guess it all depends on the kind of electronic musician I am and I’ve clearly got some more thinking to do.
