Sounds

Image by Barry Walker

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– Atmosphere and Soundscape Music –

– Music and Audio for Games –

– Film and Commercial Composition –

– Live Groove and Tasteful Piano –

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Latest News

Musical Bingo Vol. 1

MBV.1 was a project where I recorded (nearly) one song a week – every week.    Often with random notes pulled from a vase – occasionally even random keyboard sounds – this was a project about coming up with ideas on the fly and going with it – usually while filming the whole thing as it happened.    As the weeks went on, the music just got better and better.   Here are some 30 second-ish preview clips or skip down to the videos to hear more.

I am currently producing out my 10 (or so) favorites with full drums/piano/etc. and will release that collection as an album of track on iTunes/Amazon/etc. in early 2018.   I can only say that so far, they sound AMAZEBALLS!

Video’s from Musical Bingo Vol. 1

(click the top left icon to see the full playlist – 38 songs)

Orbit: A Love Story

A multimedia musical adventure

Earth revoles on its axis at 1675 km/h
It bolts around our Sun at 107,000 km/h
and around the Milky Way at 800,000 km/h…
Often, it feels like we are going nowhere.

soundstoryWhat goes around, comes around…How often do we find ourselves repeating? Both triumphs and failures…, time and again we fall back to our pattern and hop on for another go-round. Often, we make the very same mistakes, go down the paths we’re familar with, and complain about things (while often doing little to change them…). It sometimes feels like our lives spinning around and around.

One thing I learned in my NASA days is that it takes a lot of energy to change your Orbit. Perhaps it is unwise to try… Remember that a million billion things have conspired to put you right where you are today. Change even the smallest of them and you are no longer you… This ‘record’ is a musical orbit of sorts for me as well – marking the return of more rock inspired backbeats and somewhat more complex production. (did someone say keyboard solos?)   It’s also been an amazing chance to collaborate with Laura creatively.

We’ve had a blast making it and I hope you enjoy it!

You can get singles
on Amazon, iTunes, CDBaby, etc.

or get the entire collection
in the 56 page iBook Special Edition

Learn more about the iBook in the video below.

Click the shopping cart icon to get your copy of any of the singles below!

Video’s from Orbit: A Love Story

Prior Discography

I wanted to take on the challenge of reinterpreting (stripping?) some of my earlier electronic/ambient works down into solo piano compositions that would be fun and interesting to play live. Each of the songs on this CD was recorded in one take and often improved. no overdubs, no MIDI, no quantization. The resulting recording was more emotional and soulful than anything I had done before. Stripped not only soothes you, but perhaps also challenges you, inspires you, and surprises you from time to time.

This is much of my life, if you strip away the production… and not surprisingly, it’s not what I expected.

Precise, sweet, understated to a fault… simple delicate piano. Sitting behind the keys of a full piano for the first time in ten years, I realized two unexpected things… The first was that all the bells and whistles of production aren’t necessary (at least not all the time…) Sometimes just playing is far more fun than producing…. I had been missing that. It completely renewed me. The second thing was a renewed belief that p.19 had some really great songs ‘back in the day.’ I started working out the material on piano – I still knew it by heart… and the idea of “Quarter Page” was born.

Every Time I put a CD together, I always have leftovers – Songs that just never got finished or perhaps they just got lost – a good idea that never really found its way into a box… Occasionally, completely finished, but perhaps just not fitting with everything else. These are the misfits – misbegotten children of mine that I’ve kept locked in the cellar… Some of my most favorite bits. Released as a musical freak show, for your pleasure because even misfits deserve a chance… After all, I got one…!

Living and writing in the Hollywood area is a strange thing. Getting to see the industry up close did about the same thing to me for movies that Nashville did to me for music… it made me consider a different career… perhaps it was turning 30 while shining someone’s shoes… still, the wide variety of strange and different influences helped create a neat cd. This one is on Pandora internet radio – make a station!! I was just never sure whether to go 1-10 or 10-1….

Here’s an idea… Let’s trade our car with the neighbors for an unregistered van – pack up all our things inside and move to California! Of course, we have little money and no place to stay, but why not! The excitement of doing it and actually pulling it off (and the legion of interesting people I met working at iNetnow!) was writing inspiration for some time…

 

I was not sure where to go next after the rsvp CD so Laura gave me a series of writing challenges. She would pick a (usually completely obscure) topic and I had to produce a song to describe it – many very strange and wonderful moments and songs I would never have conceived of otherwise! Some of the most fun writing possible.

 

Ever have one of those days where everything just seems to be going great. Not just great, but really quite great. As the day goes on, you start to be unable to contain your grin. You see all the beauty in this world, all at once clearly and focused – and all that has come before seems to pale in this new understanding. That’s how I felt as this was being made and I think it shows in the music.

 

I joined forces with Chad Corley (the Sleep-Ins, kingsizerobot) and electronic ‘thermal romantic’ composer Michael Lee Thomas, in 1995, to record this exotic mix of texture and tempo. The resulting CD was a beautiful mix of joy and sorrow reflected in song. Every song from this record made the New Age charts on MP3.com.

 

Live @ Levy’s and Live at the MU are both EP’s of clips recorded live at Levy’s Volk Jamboree in Corvallis in 2012 and at the Oregon State Memorial Union Ballroom in December of 2013. The dreamy delayed atmospheres gave the material a life of its own. I make up about half of what I play at shows on the spot and am often as surprised as anyone by what comes out.

 

Musical Background / Bio

70s

I started taking lessons on piano at age 4 from one of my mom’s former students.    She spent a fair amount of time on theory which, of course, I hated at the time but am so very thankful for now!!   (thanks Lisa!)

It is also a scary, but sadly true, tale that one of my first public shows was to sing Three Blind Mice in German in front of the whole town of Monessen at the Cultural Heritage Festival.   Still trying to live that one down…

Before I was 10, I was performing with the Tamburitzans.    Weekly rehersals, long bus trips to strange cities, drunken parents in elevators, changing costumes backstage…with girls…   It was a really great training ground.    Somewhere in Cleveland, I had to open a show singing a Capella (in Croatian!) …   I boldly walked up to the front of stage and when the curtain opened … I swear there was like a bazillion people.    It was both awesome and terrifying.   (nailed it!)

80s

As electronic music became more popular, I quickly became enamoured with the synth.

I played out in the region with techno band Eargasm which evolved into the bands Astrix and p.19.   In 1989, we recorded an EP called ‘Shades of Black’ at Alphastar Studios near Pittsburgh, PA.   (Wayne Mitzen & Buffalo Nason Geig, engineers and Matt Silliman, producer)

[two tracks from this EP are below plus one we recorded later during the Atlas Street years in Murfreesboro, TN – the masters for everything have sadly been long lost…  though I am glad to have had the opportunity to record in analog 2″ tape studios…  anywho – aging cassettes were all I could recover] (I’m also embarassed to say I can’t remember the name of the engineer in Murfreesboro – which is too bad because he was friggin awesome!)

90s

I moved to Tennessee to get a BS in Recording Industry Mgmt in 92 from Middle Tennessee State University.  While there, I interned for Columbia/CBS Records, Capital Nashville, 328 Performance Hall, and for nearly two years at Buddy Lee Attractions with Joe Harris helping to launch Garth Brooks, Tricia Yearwood, and Mark Chestnutt amoungst others.

I landed at Integrated Copyright doing administration and there met Sleep-Ins guitarist Chad Corley.   Through a series of road trips that involved aliens and other Texans – including producer Michael Lee Thomas – we recorded the Bathsheva Mine Field Dream CD in 1995.   Several songs from that CD charted on the then new MP3.com including Subkarma and Dreaming – both of which hit #1 in the new age category.

We formed Longhouse Records and I recorded and released the photography/music project rsvp  in 1996 and the ‘write on demand’ experimental project Assignments in 1998.

00s

After Y2K, we moved to LA where I worked for a Hollywood internet start-up.   (a 1-800 human powered smart phone before technology made people obsolete…!)    While there I worked a bit as a PA for legendary film composer and spontaneous composition maestro Bill Goldstein (Fame, Shocker, etc.).  Sadly life intervened and I had to quit, but I learned a lot that I still use today.

I released the more dance/groove oriented Suncatcher in 2000 and the concept record Counting Out Time (currently on Pandora) in 2001 before moving to North Dakota to get a MS Degree in Space Studies.    After graduating in 2004, I put out an outtakes record with some new material called Exiled from Outer Space.

10s

Right around the time I finished a second MS degree at Oregon State,  Laura found a beautiful electric baby grand piano and before long I started playing it more regularly.     I started with a CD of p.19 remakes called Quarter Page in 2010 and then a CD of piano revamps of previously released solo compositions called Stripped (all recorded live).

As I became more comfortable behind the piano, I began to do shows again around the region, several of which I recorded live and released as EP’s.

From 2012-2014, I was working on the multimedia ebook/CD called Orbit: A Love Story.    It was released in 2015 on iTunes and you can learn more about that above on this page.

In 2015, I recorded an improv ‘song/video a week’ in a series called Musical Bingo!     I am currently recording the final piano overdubs for these during a series of live shows in the US and New Zealand.   Musical Bingo Live will be released on this website sometime during Spring of 2017.