Sunday, July 27, 2008

All's Well

So, in the 90s I was in a band, 2.5D. It was a great band, full of odd meters and sophisticated harmonic passages, and had a conceptual premise fueling it -- Video Games meet Music. The idea rested on an engine I developed that enabled designers to create highly emotional characters based upon Jungian archetypes. The onscreen characters would interact with a user over time, and would reveal new music, and the music's emotional origins, based upon the user's level of intimacy with the onscreen character. (I was a game developer back in the day...)

2.5D got pretty far, considering how hard it is to do anything in the music business. We had a development deal with Capitol Records, a large following in NYC, and a pretty slamming demo exhibiting the concept that got noticed by Wired Magazine, Peter Gabriel, and Gary Gersh.

As a vocalist, 2.5D was a great medium. I got to sing rock and roll, but also had opportunities to use other types of voices as well, from ethnic to jazz to opera. One of the things I loved the most was the vocal workout that I got at every rehearsal and gig.

Cut to, well, now -- I haven't been in that band since 1995, and have been completely out of technology since around 2001. I never ever thought I would return to either the music performance world, nor the world of games. I'm now singing in Video Games Live -- a concert of music from Video Games. The ultimate Video-Games-Meet-Music forum. It's not what I envisioned in the 90s, but it still meets all the central criteria I was after: video games/technology, music, multimedia, touring, wild audiences, operatic, rock and ethnic singing, and family.

Not sure how this life arc happened, but I'm pretty happy about it!

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