I got started making music back in 1995, making horrible recreations of Nine Inch Nails songs in Screamtracker, and later Impulse Tracker. I used to work over the internet with a guy in Alabama on an instrumental electronic music project called The Product of Frozen Sperm, and even performed a set of thePFS songs 'live' in York at the Fenix nightclub on New Years Eve 1998. I also released an album of original electronic experimental music on MP3.com under the name Leviathant. There were some neat ideas, but I was terrible at writing melodies, much less making songs with any sort of structural evolution. But there was a period of time where I was higher on the industrial charts on MP3.com than Sister Machine Gun. I took a screenshot at the time! No idea where it went.

In 2001, I joined a punk band called Slow Andy. It was kind of a joke band assembled by a bunch of friends, one of which quit drumming. "Hey Matt," the lead singer Jamie asked me, "You program drum machines, right? We have a drum kit, do you want to join the band as our drummer?" So I played drums with the band for five years, and bass for the sixth. We gave out thousands of CDs, played hundreds of shows, and have a full album recorded, but unreleased because the vocals were never finished. I just put up . The first track is painfully out of tune, but I promise we bought tuners after that show. I'm actually pretty proud of most of what we put together, but our standout track is definitely , which follows the story of the original "The Crazies" film.

During that same time period, I continued exploring the electronic aspects of music by joining up with another group of friends trying out the 'making music' thing. In 1998, "Stasis" was a loosely formed group of myself on drum machines (Yamaha RY10, Electribe ER-1), Jordan Smith (bass, acoustic guitar), Tony Topper (keyboards, some drum programming), and Ryan Shorb (electric guitar). What came out of that project were a lot of sketches, a few jam sessions, but no real songs to speak of. However, I started working on a side-side project with Jordan, a project he came to call Tears for Agnes. Essentially, Jordan wrote melodies on an acoustic guitar, and arranged them alongside a bed of electronics and field recordings. We released a five song EP in 2002, which I essentially took orders of through MySpace. We set to work on a full-length continuation and expansion, which resulted in the 2005 release of Shui. We did a short run (100 discs) which we sold through CD Baby, who also puts our music up on iTunes & the like.

In 2006, my wife & I moved into a house that we had to completely renovate. Four years later, we finished, and I started thinking about music again. Doing much better financially than I was in 2003, I finally bought a somewhat decent drum kit. A few years ago, there was a rash of shitty music that came out by the likes of Sleigh Bells, and fuck I've blocked out the other shitty music that was just so simple, and yet so popular... Melissa and I decided that rather than bitch about it, let's put our money where our mouth is and make our own simple rock music. She picked up an Eastwood Mandocaster and some pedals, I got a ridiculous deal on a 50 watt JCM800, and we started Up Your Cherry, the initial idea being that it would be a noise-pop duo, with effected electric mandolin, acoustic drums, and drum machines. We have a number of original songs, but have only properly-ish recorded one of them back in 2012. In true Spinal Tap fashion, we've opened up for several puppet shows, and have been the house band for several theatre acts, playing between scenes and such. I'm really hoping to get more of that recorded this year.

In April 2013, I joined up with a band some guys at work were trying to get started. They basically wanted to do something heavy, and since Up Your Cherry was so sporadic, I offered to try my hand at the drums with them. When I signed on, Jon was writing riffs, Nate was laying down bass, and Lance was doing guitar acrobatics. After a few months, we started to tighten up, and I started upgrading my drum equipment, and bought a Zoom R16, doing multitrack recordings of just about every practice. Here's an example of what we sounded like by August. Around this time, we started looking for a singer. It took some finding, but now we're fronted by Renee, who's maybe 21 years old as of this post, and has a great knack for picking up on our odd time signatures, and writing lyrics on the spot. We played our first show in the last week of December, and the day after we took our equipment back to our rehearsal space, it was shut down because of water damage to the electrical system. It opens back up February 11... hopefully.

Simultaneously, I'm working on electronic music still. I've got a pretty decent arsenal of equipment now. Today, I did this with my Tempest. It's just a sketch, cut together from a live jam over a single pattern. But it's a start.