I grew up in the American South. I was born just outside Nashville around the end of 1961, so my early childhood was spent in a culture that was characterized by a lot of transition. There was, of course, the very good end of segregation and Jim Crow. But at the same time, there was also this very bad end to a simpler feel of community, as Nashville leapt forward into a more impersonal, 'big city' feel. It was also a fairly uncertain time; my grandparents had a fallout shelter, my uncle was serving in Vietnam, and so on.
It was pretty early in that uncertain period that I started learning music. This wasn't all that uncommon in my family; supposedly, the musical roots go back several generations on my mother's side, and there's also a few musical types on my father's as well. But up to that point, only my aunt had studied 'proper music', and it was under her instruction in piano that I started off to become the second in the family to do so.
In the late 1960s, a couple of things happened that had a lot to do with cementing my current musical directions. One was, like for many others, the release of "Switched-on Bach". The new spectrum of sounds that was on this album, to someone so young who was accustomed to the usual sounds of pianos, organs, violins, guitars and so on...it was quite heady. And because I showed such an interest in that, my parents took me to see a concert given in 1969 by David Rosenboom. This was no "Switched-on Bach" thing, however, but serious avant-garde work done by a composer who had just completed his training with Salvatore Martirano, one of the major luminaries of the American avant-garde at that time. Rosenboom was using this huge ARP 2500 system, an enormous thing, and the music was like something from some other world entirely. I think it was that night that more or less set up what I would be doing with my life later on.
As I went on through school, I continued studying piano, then also clarinet, vocal work in various choral groups, and such. But my own musical tastes were still way ahead of this, and I started getting into various German groups...NEU!, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Tangerine Dream, and Can. And it was Can that pointed toward Karlheinz Stockhausen's work. And then it was Stockhausen's works such as "Hymnen" and "Telemusik" that pushed me toward full-on experimentation. I tinkered with various electronic things, shortwave radios, old tape machines...whatever I could come up with. Then punk popped up, and I got heavily into that, into industrial music, and for the first time into ambient music, using simple synths and tape delays.
I left high school, went to college, and got access to real synths for the first time. An ARP 2600...one of which I have today...a big EML sequencer, some tape machines, and so on. And also, a bit after this, access to real recording facilities. I'd done a little of my punk stuff in a badly-implemented studio in Nashville, but the studio at Middle Tennessee State University let me do some empirical tinkering for the first time in the sort of environment that, eventually, I would build up on my own. I experimented with multiple tape-machine delays, multitracking, processor cascades, layering criss-crossed sequential bits...basically, the groundwork for what I do today, much of this thanks to my composition teacher, Dr. Thom Hutcheson, who gave me a lot of rein and leeway in these musical explorations. After a couple years hiatus to get some 'real world' experience in the music field in Nashville...a very educational and not very pleasant experience, I'll note...I returned to complete my undergrad degree in Composition, then went off to do graduate studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From there, I went to Illinois when Tennessee's redneck governor at that time decided to cut all the funding for the arts programs as a bit of 'political revenge' against the former university Chancellor, Lamar Alexander, who was unusual in that he was a Republican who actually supported things like arts and education and the like. The redneck governor, however, seemed to only support getting people to drink beer and be stupid. It was really no loss for me to leave such a place that insisted on harboring such backward thinking.
But Illinois was no picnic, either. I moved there with my significant other, who I'm still together with some 15 or so years later as of the time of writing this. And I figured there would be no issues in getting on with continuing my grad studies there. But Illinois's composition department was (and largely still is) stuck in this other sort of backward thinking, with an aesthetic set firmly jammed in the early 1970s. Since many of my influences were such 'unapproved' people as Brian Eno, Klaus Schulze, et al, I caught a bunch of flak for 'not being properly serious'. I left Illinois, without completing my studies, after only one semester.
At Illinois, I'd made the acquaintance of Salvatore Martirano, and I continued off and on private studies with him outside of the school until the ALS which he had made it too difficult for him in the early parts of 1995. Sal's advice made it easier for me to walk away from academic studies and the potentially cushy but also potentially constraining possibility of teaching at the collegiate level. He told me that when he got into music, what he loved was to play jazz piano. And so he went into music studies, and then went off to study with Dallapiccola, then into teaching, and more teaching, and then tenure, and so forth. And one day, he realized he wasn't playing that much jazz piano anymore. So he said that, at that point in my studies, I had this choice to either go on pursuing my own music...or to get locked into the demands of an academic institution and the possible traps there that could lead me away from my own musical visions. Serious or not by Illinois's standards, I opted to follow my own muse.
With the help of a lot of friends, especially my current business manager Dr. Les Savage, my S.O. Paul Defenbaugh, and my current tech assistant Simon Shak, I've been working on music outside of academia since then. It's no easy feat. Much of what I do still falls into the realm of 'art music', so there's no funding for it in the USA and there's very few venues for performing it here as well. But thanks to labels such as Suilven and Magnatune and the like who feel that this sort of work is important and appealing, I'm able to get my work heard. And with the final bits of learning which I've gotten from studies under the pioneering German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, I feel even more certain that I'm on the right track. My conversion in 2002 to the Jodo Shinshu sect of Mahayana Buddhism has also lended new ways of looking at the world and at myself which has, in turn, changed how I approach my music...for the better, I think.
At this point in time, my studio, The Aerodyne Works, is more or less up and running, although we're still having to drag gear around as things like flooring, trim, etc get installed. Still, it's functional enough that the recent sessions for "Don't Look Down" (with Kurt Doles and Daniel Patrick Quinn) and the Magnatune release "Sferica" were quite a success. At this point, I've returned full-time to my music, and that, with the capabilities of the studio, are proving to be quite productive. As we leave 2006, I'm awaiting releases of new material on Magnatune ("Within This Space"), the German label Ex Ovo ("Chime Cycles"), and Texas-based Divine Frequencies ("Eastward"), and preparing for the sessions for a fourth release by Kurt and I, to be recorded in January of 2007. Hopefully, 2007 will prove to be a pleasantly eventful, creative, and fruitful year as I continue to create for those who are ready to listen.
One last little thing here: I've added a LastFM chart to show what I'm currently listening to on their service. Some of the things you might see here might be of some use in seeing what's going on in my world right now.
