Artist Bio

In the early to mid 90s I was attending university in Chicago and consuming music voraciously.  My friends and I all djed at our college’s (Northwestern) radio station WNUR.  My freshman year I was doing a jazz, rock and freeform show.  I remember one day a week worked out where I was doing shows from 5am to 10am, and then again from 1-4pm and then 7-10pm!  Not sure how I did it.

By sophomore year I wanted to contribute more.  My two flatmates and I decided to form a band.  It was named wendyfix after a local high school tennis star.  I played drums….with the children’s drum kit I got when I was around 10 years old.   I had started taking drum lessons when I was 8 after banging on the couch one too many times listening to my brother’s lp copy of Rush “Permanent Waves”.

Wendyfix existed for about 3 years until graduation.  My junior year I also started playing drums in a band called Remy with two other WNUR music obsessives.  And by my senior year I was also drumming in a band with my girlfriend at the time called Not Without My Daughter.  Busy times!

After graduation I wandered around trying to figure out what to do.  I lived in New York and Chicago each for a year.  I worked in record shops (Reckless in Chicago, Kim’s West in New York). I PA’ed on TV commercials. I obtained a post graduate degree studying popular music with Simon Frith in Glasgow in the late 90s.

The idea of starting a record label periodically would enter my mind.  But I kept telling myself that my tastes were always changing too fast to do that.  I thought record labels had to have a “sound”.  And I didn’t want my brain to feel stuck in a certain genre.

That changed when I moved back to New York from Glasgow in late 1998 though.  I was working at the now defunct shop Etherea in the East Village.  A bunch of us who worked there created an experimental electronic night at Brownies called Invisible Cities.  We had Wednesday nights from 11-4am.

At first we thought we’d just be djing, but there were so many folks looking to play that couldn’t find a spot, we eventually started having a “live” laptop set every week.  This was at a time when performing with a laptop computer was becoming possible for the first time.

I met so many interesting musicians through this experience that I decided that it was finally a good time to start a record label.  And Carpark was born!

Experimental electronic music seems a far cry from the introspective indie rock of Wendyfix and Remy but it all made sense to me.  Anyway one of the things I learned running Carpark was that I didn’t have to stick with a certain sound.  So after doing the electronic thing with Carpark for a few years I started branching out and now just put out whatever I think sounds good/interesting etc.

A year or two ago I thought it would be a good idea to dust off the half inch tapes and make this music available again.  Hope you enjoy!

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Videos

Remy - "Coco Pebbles" (official music video)