Click here for my press bio (the pitchy, professional one).

I was born in Oxnard, California on November 9th, 1974. My parents, both brilliant artists and the two most colorful people I've ever known, gave me all a budding artist could ever want for and I cite them as my two greatest influences. I was raised by my dad in rural Kansas but spent a few summers with my mom in California. Dad ran his own auto upholstery business (with me as his shop-hand), played guitar, made wood carvings and knives. Mom was an aspiring folk singer turning classical composer who now is also an author and web designer. As I said, what more could I have asked for?

Despite all of that fertile ground, I drifted for much of my young adult life chasing the wrong things (for me)... unchallenging jobs, prospects for marriage, any other sign of a normal life. It took some painful falls to finally get me to accept that I was an artist and that I had to rebuild my life around that core. When I did, the rewards seemed almost immediate... increasingly fulfilling jobs, honest relationships, and purer art. But I've had to sacrifice much for those purer experiences. It's a lonely life and those who "get me" are few and far between. However, as the years accumulate and the wisdom percolates, I'm perhaps beginning to see where it is I should be going, and that give me much needed hope for the future.

I first got into music in the 5th grade, after convincing my dad to buy me a snare drum. My inspiration? I wanted to play the drum line to Twisted Sister's We're Not Gonna Take It. Instead, I was channeled into the school band where I lost my interest learning simple cadences to hokey marching songs. Failing at that, and after throwing up in rehearsal due to having the flu, I was "promoted" to First (ie only) Ratchet Player. I dropped band and went back to the music-listening role.

In 1991 at age 16, while vacationing in California, I decided to give guitar a try. I spent a couple weeks learning chords from my mother's Mel Bay chord book and quickly wrote my first two songs. I wasn't quite sold yet but I gave it more consideration when I began to learn melodies by ear. When I returned home, I became friends with a local rock drummer who one day set me in front of his guitarist's full-stack Crate amp with a Washburn electric strapped over my shoulder. He showed me what a power chord was, then turned the amp on and nodded my way. In that one simple moment of a guttural, grinding outburst, something primal awoke and I knew without question that guitar -and music- would be with me the rest of my life.

He taught me a lot about rock music, timing, rhythm, arrangement, and band dynamics. But high school would soon be over and I'd be on my way towards a solo future, having to trust in the unconventional teachings and in my own creativity to pave the way. To this day, now 18 years later, I've neither had nor sought legitimate lessons or training, choosing instead to go it alone and listen to my inner voice. It's been frustrating and glorious, and I've made many errors and discoveries. I cannot "shred" like most guitarists half-my-age or engage in music theory talk with my peers but, like them, I delight in figuring out how to say what I hear in my soul.

I follow the whims of my creative process. This makes it extremely hard to write within a particular style, consistently or consecutively. In my early days, I stayed pretty true to my glam-rock, bluesy-rock, and metal influences, but it was only a couple years after I went solo that I found something truly mine in the more experimental, progressive styles. Of course, it took a few more years to track it down and harness it. And prey always remains elusive and squirrely even when captured.

As a kid, my dad taught me catch-and-release fishing. That's undeniably my favorite strategy with music, the pure act of catching something -a note, melody, harmony, tone, texture, mental image- savoring it, and then letting it back into the great void from where it came. It doesn't even matter to me if it's recorded. I get my high from the effect, not from the cause. Because of that, or rather my particular perception of that, I am neither performer nor entertainer. To be honest, much of the time I don't even like writing out a full piece of music or recording it. But, ya' know, sometimes you find that one idea that won't let go and you want everyone to hear it, hoping like hell that they will experience some high from it, too.

As mentioned earlier, I had the privilege of being my dad's shop hand for several years. He taught me some pretty cool things with regard to materials, sewing, and using our God-given gift of ingenuity. Unfortunately, I didn't pay as much attention as I wish I had. He passed away in June 2008, inadvertently taking his extensive knowledge with him. Interestingly, though, his absence has reopened some of my memories I'd thought had long vanished.

But going back what seems a lifetime ago, his example led me to many years of building model aircraft, sketching designs both technical and abstract, and working in the three-dimensional realms of clay, stone, wood, and fabric. To be honest, though, I've not done a great deal in those mediums, mostly I've stayed with music. But in 2007 the urge struck me to get back into the crafting game, largely in the way of custom leather guitar straps. Like my music, my first straps were unlike any others I'd known, but I trusted my process and saw them through. I and others who've seen and used them have come to love them. I'm looking forward to making more and experimenting more.

Living a life of creativity, a well which is never bottomless, one must learn to use resources efficiently. This includes creativity itself. I've observed the best natural balance when I change mediums periodically. Different mediums use and tax different parts of your creativity, so working with one only as long as its resources abound seems to stave off droughts and collapses. Getting back into crafting, whether leathercrafting or something else, has been a huge boon to my music and vice-versa.

One of the skills I've most appreciated and oddly lumped into my arsenal of creativity is computer programming. I've never been a total stranger to it; my grandmother and I worked side-by-side learning BASIC on an old TRS-80 back in the mid-1980s. My best friend from school was always into computers and some time after we'd gotten out on our own, he began teaching me to reverse-engineer software in Assembly Language. But I still saw programming as anything other than a creative practice, seeming very rigid and pragmatic. I never identified with the "programmer mindset" until after I got into it myself at a depth that allowed me to see just how overly creative it is. It's unlike any other kind of creativity I've ever experienced, but creative nonetheless. I get such a high from coding that it sometimes takes days to come down after a project. By "high", I mean my analytical and conceptual faculties are on fire. I'll wake up in the morning and be able to jump right back into heavy coding before I've even finished my first cup of coffee, and I even work out some things or devise others in dreams.

I began by learning JavaScript, then CGI/Perl, SSI, PHP, Linux shell, Visual Basic, and several others. I became very proficient in a handful, decently equipped in some, and I refreshed myself in others as needed. Learning one was like being handed the Rosetta Stone for all languages. I learned many of my languages while employed as a network engineer and web developer for an Internet service provider, where I conceived, designed, and maintained a wireless infrastructure management application (which the company later helped me apply for patent). But what I learned at work I took home and used on my own stuff, during which I learned more stuff I could take back and apply at work. It was like a high-inducing high. But those days came to a pink-slipped end and, aside from my role in Alla Breve, much of my programming is now done on personal projects. Most of my own projects are never seen by anyone else as many of them are backend apps for my websites and a few are music software I use regularly (I wrote the software that gave Temple of Unmanfiest Dreams and most of my subsequent music it's unique sonic signature). I also have a repository containing some of my various projects.

Preceding the learning curve of programming in the late 1990s, computer graphic design was another medium I fell in love with. As both a personal and professional web designer/developer, I continue to use this medium heavily, though more "as needed" today than in the beginning when I would often spend 10-12 hours straight just designing for the sake of it.

Also in the 90s, I educated myself on analog and digital electronics in hopes of creating my own guitar effects pedals (which I did successfully a few times). I've always loved drafting so the process of designing circuit boards and schematics was great fun.

As you may be thinking by now, I love to write. I've never really gone public with any of my writings but I've always enjoyed writing technical documents, references, and the occasional short story. The downside is that I'm not much of a reader and I lack the discipline needed to stick with anything longer, though I still want to try someday.