ABOUT

About me

I am an educator, a musician, and an audio engineer. I have taught over 4000 hours of higher education coursework, have performed over 800 shows, and ran sound for over 800 events.

I have been teaching at The Recording Arts Center (TRAC) at Studio West since 2015. I also taught various courses in the Audio Production department at the Art Institute of California San Diego.

My background mostly stems from my involvements in independent music. Since 1994 I have played guitar and sang in a musical group named The Locust. We recorded several records which were released by a handful of record labels including Epitaph (Anti) and Mike Patton's Ipecac. During the group's active years we toured Europe ten times, Japan three times, and the US a dozen times. Artists we did full tours with include Fantômas, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Melt Banana, Dillinger Escape Plan, and At the Drive-In. John Waters used two Locust songs in his film Cecil B. Demented.

I also play guitar and sing in a group called The Institute for Navigating the Universal Self (INUS) and in the past I played synthesizers in a band named Holy Molar, which released four records. I also appeared on albums by Bastard Noise and Aux Raus (NL) as a guest musician. In addition, I have also performed solo infotainment pieces, rooted in experimental pedagogy, which incorporated audio devices/effects I built using Arduino microcontrollers and the visual programing language Pure Data. As a musician I have been sponsored by Fender, KOMA Elektronik (based in Berlin), as well as DigiTech.

I was the lead sound engineer at a venue named Whistle Stop for several years and I was was a Production Technician / Event Manager at UCSD in the Music department. I was also a contributing writer for The San Diego Reader focusing on music, art, and popular science, among other topics.

In 2011 I graduated with a degree from the music department at UCSD in a program called Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM). In the music department I was fortunate enough to study under the creator of Max/MSP and Pure Data, Miller Puckette, as well as the owner of Soundhack, Tom Erbe, who was an important mentor. I also had the great pleasure of learning under world renowned neuroscientist Dr. Ramachandran, world-altering hacktivist Ricardo Dominguez, and world-challenging gender theorist Micha Cardenas, all of whom are infinitely inspiring. While I was a student at USCD I worked on campus at the Gallery@calit2 giving tours of new media research facilities at The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), now known as the Qualcomm Institute. This included operating and demonstrating the StarCAVE, NexCAVE, and HIPerSPACE.

For a short period I functioned as a volunteer in The Brain and Perceptual Process Laboratory, directed by Dr. Ramachandran at UCSD. The lab ran a sex/body experiment which I conceived and designed. The gesture was an attempt to help formalize the concept of science outsourcing creativity to artists for the ultimate purpose of aiding the evolution of the collective unconscious.

For three years I co-curated a monthly event entitled Makeout Weird (MW) at The Whistle Stop. The event brought local experimental artists/musicians together with inventors and professors, showcasing their visual art and live musical performances.