Music

I create electronic music under the name Dei Sub - which is derived from Princeton's motto, but does not carry any specific meaning from it. In other words, don't try to figure out the music by translating the Latin. When I say "electronic music" I mean pretty much anything that would be classifed as techno, tech house, drum n' bass, dark trance, ambient, experimental, etc. I do NOT like most trance (which sounds like trash) nor most mainstream dance music, which is typically just pop songs over club beats. I'm not into soulful vocals, in fact I once told someone that I thought vocals in music were vulgar (in the intellectual sense, not like rap lyrics). In fairness, a lot of people would probably say my stuff sounds like trash too; that's just the way it goes.

You can find my official discography, naturally enough, on this Discogs page. Here's my most recent album, Fourth Dimension, on Spotify. There is also a Dei Sub Facebook page, and at one point I was maintaining a separate site for it here.

I'm less influenced by specific artists (with a few exceptions like Joey Beltram, Speedy J, and DJ Cam) and more by specific tracks that have captured my attention over the years: Jamie Myerson Heartsong, Norma G Son of Norma, Age of Love, Shogun Nautilus and Latin Nights, Swing Time Dee Your Wildest Dreams, Nepa Allstar The Way, etc. Also influential are some of the really good DJ mixes I've come across, like James Lavelle's Tribal Gathering and Cream Live, some of John Digweed's best work, Sasha Global Underground Ibiza, and many others. I appreciate hard dissonant techno, but I also love evolving complex chords you can listen to for hours. I also appreciate a great many classical composers, among them Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Mahler, Saint-Seans, Prokofiev, Stravinsky... you get the idea. To me music is about the product you hear and not about seeing the performance, although a virtuoso can be impressive to behold. As far as I'm concerned, parties should always have DJs and never live bands, and it better be a good DJ. I've been to a few rock concerts in my life, and just don't really get it: the crowd experience, ear-blistering volumes, etc. Anyway...

Music and I have a relationship that goes back to when I was a young child picking out tunes on an upright piano, followed by ten years of formal classical piano lessons culminating in a solo performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in my final recital before heading off to college. I'll be honest, I hated practicing, and would have been much better if I had practiced as much as I was supposed to - but that kind of perfecting repetition was and is not for me.

My love of electronic music began quite innocently with the addition of a Sound Blaster Pro to my college computer during my freshman year. That sound card had a MIDI interface and an internal synthesizer, and I discovered that it could be used to create music and not just play it (you know, the product vs. performance thing). I got into trackers and at about the same time found techno, after years of listening to mostly classical music with a tiny smattering of more mainstream stuff like Led Zeppelin and U2. The energy of the driving beats combined with the layering of harmonic sounds and dissonant noise was irresistable. Next came a controller keyboard in the form of an E-mu Proteus MPS+ Orchestral, and by the time I graduated college I had another keyboard (a Korg DW-8000), a better computer with two better synthesizer sound cards (a Gravis Ultrasound and Sound Blaster AWE32), Boss BX-16 mixer, and dreams of getting a lot more gear and spending all of my free time making music (which I did for a few years). Incidentally, the Proteus, focused on ROM sample playback, was one of the worst possible choices for creating electronic music - it didn't even have a filter module, although I spent countless hours faking it with layered harmonics and oscillator envelopes.

By the late 90's I had another vintage keyboard (a Roland Juno 106), racks full of outboard gear like synths, samplers and effects modules, a real mixer, and a few records out on vinyl with a small Baltimore-based label called Defective Records, run by the guys in the band Glitch. In 2001 I found a newly released piece of software called Propellerheads Reason, a "virtual studio" on the computer. After a very brief interlude of using both Reason and my outboard gear, I made the jump - and transitioned to using only Reason to produce music.

Fast forward 20 years, and Reason is now up to version 11 - better and more robust than ever - and it is still my tool of choice for making music. I have way more Rack Extensions than I should and like to do the entirety of the production work inside Reason, from sound design, composing, and arrangement through to mixing and mastering. My attention to music has waxed and waned over the years, reaching a low point when I was getting promoted to Chief Technology Officer and married all within a short span of time in the mid 2000s, but it usually comes back strong.

Other than Reason itself and a mighty powerful computer to run it, my studio gear is pretty minimal: