At the very early age of 6, I was exposed to music. My parents, bless their hearts, provided me with violin lessons with Paul Rowinski, a local violin teacher in Boulder Colorado. These lessons continued all throughout my childhood up through high school. Add to that all the violins, bows and strings a young violinist grows out of, and you get a small fortune that was spent on my music education! Though I always appreciated the classical side of the violin, the younger side of me always wanted the violin to be something else: modern, hip, and cutting-edge.

So I began branching out into other genres of violin work. My stint in old-time country and bluegrass saw me finish in the top 10 one year at the Colorado State Fiddle Championships. Small stints with jazz, rock, and eclectic bands came and went, though nothing really solidified from these outings. For quite a few years I was a violinist for Darren Curtis Skanson, a classical guitarist based in Denver, CO.

Throughout all of this ever since high school, I was half-assedly experimenting with combining electronic music and violin. Never realizing that I had a concept that could work, I naively neglected the positive comments from friends and collegues when I presented my violin-electronica experiments to them. Instead, I focused solely on the dancefloor electronic side, thinking that going mainstream was the key to success. I produced two full albums without any violin whatsoever before deciding to experiment with adding some live violin to the electronic sounds.

Finally, as I was producing Set Me Free, I discovered for myself what everyone else had been saying all along – violin electronic music not only would work, but it would be the hook that sets me apart. Though Set Me Free was praised for its use of violin in electronic music, it has also been cricized for not going far enough. With that in mind, my work post-SMF has concentrated extensively on incorporating violin into mainstream electronica.

The intersection of violin and electronica is a vast uncharted area of music that I am poised to explore. Stay tuned…