Male

29

You really want to know my history??
I grew up in St. Charles, MO... at a time one of the fastest growing suburbs in the nation. Carbon copy subdivision after carbon copy subdivision, well manicured lawns, minivans and SUVs. I think there were 10 non-whites in my high school...needless to say chain restaurants and pop culture were the rule.

I moved to Cleveland at age 18 to attend college for comp sci... discovered after several years of work that I did not want to write computer code for a living. Dropped out with only 17 credits remaining to complete my degree and delivered at Zeppe's pizza and drank for two years. (It's almost impossible to find a decent job in that city) While I look most of my time spent in Cleveland as a complete waste I did meet a wonderful girlfriend and gain a lot of cultural understanding. Living at minimum wage also gave me some perspective on the lifestyles of the underprivileged.

I moved to Chicago at age 24 and have never looked back. In this city I have met numerous people that I both enjoy and respect... as well as a stable job. I don't think I've been bored a single night since I arrived, there's simply too much to do and see here. While I have been going to parties for about 6 yrs now my current environment has enabled me to take things to the next level. Groups such as Psymbolic, Chulluminati, and Entheon have shown me that there are indeed people out there like me. (Imagine that!)

I have played several instruments in my life (piano, sax, guitar) and even minored in music in college...but never found anything I was truly passionate about. Since making the transition to electronic music around the turn of the millennium I completely lost interest in traditional instruments and in performing music altogether... the thought of becoming a DJ was extremely intimidating. I started playing on vinyl late in 2005 using a friend's technics and his happy hardcore / breakcore records. While I hated the music I enjoyed the skills I was learning... and I think that breakcore was a difficult genre to begin with which helped me to improve quicker. I then bought my own tables in 2006 and did some practicing with my friends trance records, and bought some of my own psytrance records. I quickly discovered that playing psytrance on vinyl was going to be a difficult and expensive task... I would have to import records from Europe and hope they didn't get warped in the shipping process. So finally I broke down and bought pioneer CDJs... this has enabled me to explore dance music in the ways that I had always wanted to.

I'm currently working on applying all my musical theory knowledge to dance / electronic music. I was pretty surprised to learn that harmonic mixing is only a recent phenomenon... seems fairly intuitive. There's a lot about chord structure that can be used as well as chord progressions... we'll see how it all turns out.