I ended up in a band because I was lazy. The lease to the apartment I had been living in for the previous year was up and, along with my roommate Sarah, I had no place to move. Not that apartments were hard to find in Seacoast New Hampshire, but we hadn’t bothered to even look. Moving day came and I managed to secure a trailer from a co-worker’s husband to move all of our stuff into storage until we found a place to live, so at least we could vacate the premises without incident. But after all of our goods were safely stored, we didn’t really have anyplace to go. We knew these guys in a band who had a big house near campus, so we headed over there and they told us we could crash there for a few nights until we could get squared away. I had actually met all the guys in the band earlier that summer, but I sure didn’t know them well enough to feel comfortable crashing on their couch.

Well, we stayed longer than a few nights. They asked my if I played an instrument, so I dug my saxophone out of storage and we started working out some songs. Eventually, a friend of mine gave me an old Korg keyboard and I started to learn that as well.

Eight years later, I rarely play the sax anymore and I love the versatility of a good keyboard. I primarily play a Roland JP8000, but occassionally steal Brad's Korg MS2000 away from him or access patches on my Korg Oasys virtual synth. I also program a lot of the drum beats you hear in the songs using Reason -- one of the best apps ever.

Anyway, I also have picked up the basics of being a recording engineer. Aleutian was in the middle of recording our Frame Dragging release, when our friend that was acting as our engineer decided he wanted to also be our producer. Well, that wasn't gonna happen, so he picked up his gear and left. This left us with an unfinished album and a few guys that didn't really have any experience with the technical aspects of recording. I decided it couldn't be too hard, and we bought replacements for the pieces our former engineer had taken with him and had a go at it. Listening to that album today, I'm still very happy with the results.

Frame Dragging was recorded through a Mackie 1604vlz mixing board to a FostexD80 and D90 slaved together via midi timecode. It worked, but backups of the data were a complete pain in the ass so when Brad and I started The Faint Blue Galaxy, we looked into other options. I wanted to get some sort of interface for a macintosh computer, which led us to the Protools Digi001. And a new mac. And a Soundcraft Ghost mixing console. A rather hefty amount of debt later, we were ready to roll. We haven't looked back since...although we have managed to acquire a pretty good selection of new toys.