Coming up in the ‘70s, I (of course) played in a local band. Didn’t everyone? I started out with a used Kent bass guitar, which probably weighed more than I did, playing rock, with occasional ventures into jazz. Our band did covers of Stones, Chicago, Guess Who, Edgar Winter, Neil Young, Moody Blues, Mountain, etc. Eventually, the band broke up and we all went our separate ways, the drummer going country (after a brief stay in a glam-rock band), the lead guitarist and vocalist going Christian music, the other guitarist heading out solo with acoustic rock in local venues, the keyboardist going off to become a car salesman.
Me, I sat in my room and started buying PAIA synth modules and fed them from a crappy Montgomery Ward six string electric, running into tape loops on an old reel-to-reel. Very little remains of those experiments – a few cassettes here and there.
I jumped back into a local rock band for a while, playing bass in the Jersey Shore clubs and bars, doing covers of Stones, Allmans, Marshall Tucker, Geils, Skynyrd, and the rest. Then I scooted out, rejoining one of the former guitarists from my first band, to play as a duo, then a trio, in the quieter venues on the Shore.
Nothing lasts forever, time passes quickly, and I finally ended up sitting in my room again, playing with pawnshop synthesizers and first-generation MIDI sequencers, working under the “band” name The Door Into Summer, composing and recording, and handing out CDs to anyone who cared to listen.
Ten years into that, I created a computer program which magically turned digital images into digital music. (OK. No magic involved. But do you really have any interest in math and computer programming? Didn’t think so.) Most of what you’ll find on this page are compositions which had their start as a photograph. Of course, there’s more to it than popping in a photo, with music coming out the other end. That would be cheating, no artistry at all.
Influences? Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Klaus Schulze have certainly influenced me, to the extent that they showed me what is musically possible. But I think all music (and musicians) are an influence to some extent. Did you notice the “band” name is also a Monkees song? Everyone is an influence.