About

When I first started recording electronic music, I had an idea that I'd operate as a "band" and do a bunch of collaborations with people (or just solo releases) under the band name Blackout Princesses. It was a natural evolution from being in a series of bands that went nowhere. Using the band name also gave me cover because I’m intensely insecure about my musical ability. I wanted to give myself room to experiment. It was never really “me” releasing the music, it was a “band” called Blackout Princesses. I was also emulating in a rinkydink way how Nine Inch Nails or Gorillaz operate where there's a "band" but it's mostly one guy and whoever he wants to work with.

So, for nearly two decades, Blackout Princesses was a secret. A one man band that nobody had heard. A collection of files on a hard drive in Pennsylvania. Then, in 2021, music started trickling out. The trickle became a torrent and within five years, 17 albums worth of new music had appeared.

It drew from a wide array of international urban sounds. There were rich veins of New York boom bap, Minneapolis funk, Dusseldorf kosmische, Kingston dub, Detroit techno, Chicago and Brussels industrial, the electronic throb of Sheffield. As Blackout Princesses, I have appeared on podcast soundtracks, compilations, and collaborated with other artists on remixes. While earlier works adopted a lo-fi aesthetic informed by chiptune and dungeon synth, more recent work has been increasingly sophisticated in production and composition with more touches of lush gothic romanticism and a wholehearted embrace of 1980s synth cheese.

The underlying idea of Blackout Princesses has always been that music is literal magic. Through only the manipulation of the vibrations of air, the musician can conjure images in the mind, alter emotional states, induce the body to move.

I first released any of my music as Blackout Princesses on February 5, 2021. At the time I had about 3 albums worth of material saved up that I'd recorded over the previous two decades. Since then I've continued to compose, produce, and release music. This compilation celebrates my semidecade, or lustrum, of pretending to be a real musician. These aren't necessarily my best or favorite pieces but they each have a story behind them and together they tell a story of how I've developed as a musician over the last five years. It's a great place to start.