Troy Gardner (keyboards, vocals, vocal percussion, guitar and bass)
I have music running through my head pretty much non-stop,24/7, it's a pulse that runs throughout my life. It's loudest in the mornings and in the deep pockets of the night, and it's relentless until it's vented. This has been true for as long as I can remember, before I was able to understand, capture or play it, though there are amusing recorded attempts to do so at the age of 4 via portable battery-powered tape recorder I carried.
Expressing interest in music early on my parents started me on lessons, first trombone. Later they invested in a piano, which I found infinite more satisfying as a creative tool being capable of more than one voice at a time. Throughout junior high and high schooI performed in dixie land and jazz bands, while still listening to post modern, rock, Depeche Mode and the like. When my voice got past it's cracking, inspired by jazz artists like Bobby McFerrin started to scat and do beatbox. In marching band and orchestra I enjoyed the massive polyphony and teamwork, and at the family church the ability arrange. After school hours the availability of personal computers and MIDI allowed another step in creative ability, and an exciting new sonic range of electronic instruments to explore.
In high school finally I came up with the handle "TheGreyman" see here for the story. In college pursuing music composition as a major (along with engineering), I became increasingly frustrated by the overbearing theory and the nonportability of a piano or keyboard, so I picked up the guitar and bass, played in a few bands but quickly got frustrated by the difficulty and flakiness of getting musicians together, thus retreated into my room and focused on music creation solo.
As computers and multitrack soundcards became cheaper and more powerful, it became possible to seriously non-toy like music by oneself at a reasonable price.
From 1990 and on I have played with countless composition programs: Cubase, Logic Audio, Cakewalk, on and on. Soundcard after sound card, keyboard after keyboard. But generally in the end found myself disenchanted with the compositional and performance capabilities, as each tool requires you to think in a particular way, and the latency involved with software effects was disconcerting. For a list of gear I currently use please see the gear page.
In 2004 working for a startup with a very small room, my studio locked in a storage facility for several months. I got introduced to laptop based loop based composition, and open-source computer based synthesis, armed only only with a cheap headset, Acid 4.0, Crystal. I started writing on the subject of Technology, and worked more on sound synthesis trying to create the sounds I heard in my head. After several years of watching several electronica performers and DJ's, with similar soundsand the stale 'prerecorded' ness of the performance. If a person can hit play and then walk away, it's struck me more as karioke or a recording, instead of being a performance. There was simply no risk for things to go terribly right or terribly wrong, no happy accidents which are quite common in Jazz. Then I was introduced by a music promoter friend to Joeseph Arthur, Andrew Bird both of whom being a solo perfomer, via a mixture of skill and delay effects creating amazing dense floods of sound and commanding performances.
In 2005 I was caught the charismatic beatbox performer Kid Beyond armed only with little more than a mic and a laptop created a compelling dynamic performance larger than many 5 piece bands. Find more about his technique, renewed my sense of possibility, and also rekindled my interest in the beatbox movement which has grown more visible thanks to the internet.
Looking forward I hope to integrate more performance art (video, poi spinning, video gesture recognition) into the performances.