im not really sure what sparked this or how it happened, but at some point last night i realized i had been writing out my story of sorts, and i thought id share… people always bitch cause i dont have a bio up anywhere, and i typically think band bios are boring and stupid as shit. but i kinda just started writing as if i was talking to someone about what id been through to make this all happen this far, and heres what i ended up with. i hope you dont think its stupid. and if you do, fuck you. cause it was hard to get here.
cheers,
-PM
“n/a is Me.
I am n/a.
This art is my life, my mind and my story.
I cut my teeth playing bass, guitar and re-conceptualizing how to play and use guitar-synth technology for SF Bay Area metal/trip hop outfit EMB.
That outspoken, noisy, sweaty and visceral band was a live standout, releasing self-recorded live tracks as well as it’s own remixes, and most notably a self-produced, gritty concept album titled “the End Means the Beginning” in 2002.
But after deaths, conversions to christianity and suicides, that band was destined to eat it’s own fucking head. And so, it perished…
I retreated to my studio, taught myself to sing, worked on an independent film, produced and engineered in the bay for a while, learned piano as I toured the world as a keyboard tech for a world renowned RnB act, and resurfaced a few years later as the vocalist and band leader, with a new group of misfits labeled “Neveragain”. I tied the two opposing words together: An homage to humanity’s inherent failure – ceaselessly repeating yesterdays mistakes – as immortalized in the Depeche Mode classic “Policy of Truth”…
“Never again, is what you swore, the time before.”
This aggressive and pissed new live act was built out of seasoned Bay Area talent… including players from The Sick, Death Valley High, Dead Hand System and UN I.D., as well as EMB.
Working with veteran SF producer Bill Cutler as my mentor, and NIN studio alum Brian Krawcykowski, I recorded and digitally released “the Great Betrayal” via Tunecore/iTunes in late 2008. It dripped and oozed with yarns of characters in their own snapshots of failure… Some were me, some were friends of mine, and some were no longer my friends after they realized just who the fuck it was I was talking about.
We’d vigorously sweat that album out wherever we could, but trying to hold these hungry players together with little money and perform such a sonically-dense tragedy was like trying to squeeze Pink Floyd’s “the Wall” onto a dive bar stage on a Pabst Blue Ribbon budget.
It was an amazing feat at the time… but it was overly complicated and painfully stressful, as I tried to realize what I had created on disk with nothing more to my name than the modest personal studio I had created the album in.
I struggled for years to find the groups live voice. Ever determined to keep going I maxed out my credit on studio rent, borrowed money and fought sleep deprivation and drug addiction. The album and its contents were huge, beautiful and intense… and though the live band was very close, the bands members were fighting the world, the music and each other to make it all happen.
Something had to give…
I wanted to change… Creation didn’t need to be mired in struggle, I just wanted to be an artist and do what I loved. I was bored and exhausted with the concept of “write 12 songs, record 12 songs, release 12 songs, tour” and I wanted to do something different…
I decided to stand back and try to honestly let my life do the talking. Like so may artists I had been doing it the same way everyone else had been doing it, and that simply isn’t me.
After reinventing my world, I condensed the name of the act into simply “n/a”, and I began to write. I penned new songs with the notion in my head that the music would happen as an ongoing effect of the events around me… And that this music would be released as “Singles”, one by one, that could later coalesce into a LP format when the time was right. This album, “Flux” would develop, mutate and grow with me over time, like a living organism would.
It could change as I saw fit, as we creatures so often should in the real world. It would be a living, sonic journal.
The first of these singles was “Tempest”, released the first day of the new decade – 01/01/2010. It would be my first publicly released piece where I would perform every single note on the recording myself. The cover, I decided, would be a digital snapshot of the home I grew up in, as it tragically burned and took the lives of our family Shepherds with it in the fall of 2008…
The second single “Just As I Thought” is set to be released later this year, in conjunction with an application built for the Apple iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) that is hand designed as it were, to capture input from the fan-base in a unique new way…”
