Like most of you out there interested enough to be reading this, I live, breath, eat, sleep, drink, and poop music. All music, any style, all genres, from electronica to opera, bluegrass to rap, world music to garage bands, music is all that's ever really mattered to me.

It all started when I was five years old. I had my tonsils taken out and my parents bought me a record player and my first record, "Bugs Bunny In Storyland". Alas, the 78rpm vinyl has disappeared but I still have that record player. I used to stand and watch the record go 'round in circles (at 54 years old, I still do but for not as long).

I grew up on AM radio (WABC in NY and WAEB in PA) and remember thinking how "outasight" FM was when it first went on the air. (What ever happened to FM? FM became AM playing the same 30 crappy songs over and over and over... I'm now realizing internet and satellite radio is the new FM- no boundaries. There can NEVER be boundaries...).

<<To this day, I can recall where I was and what I was doing the first time I heard "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", "She Loves You", "Satisfaction", "Honky Tonk Women"... If there is such a thing as a soul song, like a soul mate, it's "Honky Tonk Women". Any time I hear it, I stop what I'm doing, turn it up to an eardrum damaging level and just drink it in. Don't know if it's the cowbell, beat, the basic 3-chord structure or just the raw balls-out rock & roll, it takes control of me for 3 minutes and 4 seconds.>>

Somewhere in the late '60s, amidst listening to the Beatles, Stones, Who, Dave Clark Five, Animals, Standells, Love, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, Cream, Herb Alpert, Donald Byrd, Peter Paul & Mary, Bill Cosby, Doors, Monkees, Simon & Garfunkel, and... and... and...  I discovered an LP called Entropical Paradise by Douglas Leedy. It was a 3 (!) record set of electronic music. My only experience with electronic music up to this point was stuff I heard in school - mostly bleeps and bloops, and five out of six sides of this album was pretty much the same. But one side, entitled "The Harmonium", was different - a single chord for 20-some minutes with some slight variations close to the end.  I had never heard anything like it before - a single chord for 20 minutes! A completely different direction in music.

I made it through high school (I was a classic textbook nerd wearing a sport jacket every day), singing in and conducting a choir, listening to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Ravel, Mozart, mixed in with Captain Beyond, Steely Dan, Santana, Cat Stevens, Chicago, Yes, and... and... and... and a heavy dose of electronic music by Morton Subotnick and Beaver & Krause. High school led to college where my musical horizons continued to widen with monumental intensity - the music department had a Moog modular synthesizer.

I immediately dropped out of the teaching program and switched to Theory and Composition so I could get my hands on the Moog. I created music on it for 3 years, presenting concerts of my music in the school's planetarium, and having a few pieces featured on WMMR in Philadelphia. Still, my music was pretty much bleeps and bloops, heavy on the sequencer with some melody and mood mixed in, but no sense of ambience (yet).


                   The artist circa 1976 (Disco Stu?)

After college, I moved to LA to make it in the music business. I spent some time playing in a band that featured all synths and drums, cut a few demos, recorded a bit of background music for a movie (“Black Fist”, available now on any number of no-name DVD labels, usually for $0.99) and worked with a production group grooming bands for the big time.

<<An aside - My Brush With Greatness… I worked with a band called Bluebeard in 1977. We set up a gig at the Starwood (no longer exists) and invited the record execs to come and listen. We needed an opening act, so one of the guys in the band called a buddy of his, who also had a band, to come an open for us. His buddy was… Eddie Van Halen. The rest, as they say, is history.>>

Most people trying to make it in the music business give it a lifetime. I gave it four years. By 1980, I was back in PA running a video store, By 1990, multiple Blockbusters surrounded me so I … went to work for Blockbuster! That lasted ‘til ’95 when I moved out to Phoenix, AZ. My parents had a winter home there and one year I came for a visit and never left. I went to work for a marketing company and have been with them ever since. BORING… until…

Somewhere around ’98, I discovered Acid. (Okay… first and last time I’ll make this stupid joke - the SOFTWARE, not the drug).  Looping opened up yet another musical door for me. Before Acid (nope, sorry, won’t do it again), back in PA in the early ‘90s, I was listening to a lot of ambient music; in particular, music by Steve Roach and Brian Eno. This type of music, as far back as “The Harmonium” in 1968, has always fascinated me.  Now, through my Dell, I was creating my own.

Ambient music doesn’t rely on melody to create an atmosphere, a mood, a sonic environment, a soundscape. I think I’m so drawn to ambient music because I was never really adept at writing melodies throughout college. I concentrated on arranging and sound design. That’s what I did mostly in LA also, arranging, designing, polishing other peoples’ music, and that’s just what I was doing again. I spent a few years creating music on the computer, but was left with a feeling of being somewhat unfulfilled, I wasn’t really creating; I was arranging other musician’s loops into songs. But the fire had been stoked.

In April of 2008, I had the outstanding  good fortune to attend an “Into The Soundcurrent” ambient music workshop hosted by Steve Roach at his ranch and studio just south of Tucson, AZ. Steve is an internationally known master of the genre, making music since about 1983. His work “Dreamtime Return” is considered the Mona Lisa of ambient music. Now, I had met all kinds of movie stars and musicians in LA working during the day in a drugstore at the corner of Melrose and La Brea; Diane Keaton, Charlie Watts, Rudy Vally (kids, ask your grandparents), Chevy Chase (he was a jerk)… and never bothered anyone for an autograph; they were just ordinary people to me. On the other hand, meeting Steve Roach turned me into a babbling idiot. After getting over the initial stupendousness of meeting Steve, we spent a week soaking in music, making music, learning how to hear, see and feel music, eating and breathing music, appreciating music, swapping music…   The fire in me was raging. I had to create! I put together a studio, some synths, a mixing board, echo and reverb processors and went to work.

Working on a long-form piece (listen to Steve’s “Immersion” series, or “Darkest Before Dawn” or “A Deeper Silence”), the music took an unlikely left turn when I was struck with an idea. My wife had always had trouble sleeping; she would be out 2 minutes after her head hit the pillow, but would wake up ay 2AM and not be able to go back to sleep. We had tried listening to sleep CDs, but the majority of them contained cheesy new age music, and lasted for only 1 hour. Even the CDs that contained brainwave pulses were meant to help you get to sleep but after that you were on your own. Some of the CDs even instructed you to set your player to repeat; that could be pretty distracting at 4 in the morning. Worse yet, if the CD had brainwave pulses, the same patterns repeated all night long. That’s not how your brain works while you sleep.

It hit me… I did months of research, months of recording, re-recording, scrapping and starting over, mixing, mastering, and finally… I created “Somnience”, the first 8-HOUR LONG piece of ambient music with pulses that match your normal brainwave activity over the course of a healthy night’s sleep.

I sent out test copies of the CD to friends, relatives and patients of a naturopathic physician in Scottsdale AZ, and received back unanimously positive feedback. At that point I decided to roll it out, building a website, getting it professionally duplicated, getting it into some bookstore, music stores, spas, and doing everything I could think of to get the word out. So, here I am…