About

I’m an Assistant Professor of Communications at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. I teach media production, new media, audio production, and critical studies. I advise the student-operated radio station as well. Before joining the Department of Communications at Etown in 2009, I taught in the Telecommunications Department and American Culture Studies Program at Bowling Green State University while working on my doctoral dissertation.

My PhD is in American Culture Studies with concentrations in Film, Popular Culture, and Media Studies. My dissertation is titled “Use and Influence of the Amateur Musician Narrative in Film, 1981-2001.” It is an analytical survey of four fictional amateur musician narratives created in films; the actual influences and longevity of which have far outlasted the created narratives.

I have played music for several years in “just rock” bands, some hard core and punk, some indie, some jam bands, a bit of jazz, a bit of bluegrass, and a lot of minimalist recording projects. Recently, my musical projects have veered further and further away from a reliance upon repetitive meter, tonality, and musicality. Concentrating on experimental sound, noise, and music, I like prepared strings, electronics, and nontraditional instrumentation. Sometimes I play with the KBD Sonic Collaborative.

I founded Cornslaw Industries in the Fall of 2004 after a short-lived production company, I.F.N.O.R., folded because of a lack of precise purpose. Cornslaw Industries went through several half-assed incarnations before settling in as a net.label and media collective. The now-successful and established net.label virtually releases albums and media collections by bands and artists both as digital archive re-releases or as material created specifically for Cornslaw. The label boast tens of thousands of downloads and over sixty individual releases. The label spawned a physical record label for a short time called Uncle Nicky Records. UNR released a seven inch single and assisted Mason Porter in releasing a CD.

I was born in New Jersey in 1976 and grew up with my mother in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I went to Pennsbury High School, went to New York University for one semester, before moving to Morgantown, WV in 1995 to attend West Virginia University. I was told by an advisor that I was the first student to transfer from NYU to WVU. This may or may not be true. I moved to Philadelphia in 2001, moved to Ohio in 2005, and moved back to Philly in 2009.

I am married to Carolyn and we have  two cats.

Some more about bands and stuff…

I’ve played in dozens of bands you’ve likely never heard of. Currently, I record with 1000000 a.d., sometimes DJ as PigeonDaggers, sometimes record and perform experimental and conceptual sounds as DangerVacuum.

In the past I recorded as/was a member of: Dewback, The Courteous Ninjas, PoCKetScHwa (with Chris Kasper), The Recipe, The Grossly Misjudged Collective Works of Barry’s Listening, theroyaloui, The Daven Mines, Good and the Hoods, Kind Insight, Some of the Most Famous People Alive, and Grass Combustion.

The first song I played live was at a junor high school talent show. It was “California Uber Ales” by the Dead Kennedys. I formed Dewback with some friends while in high school. We played and wrote music a lot and had an opportunity to record for a small-but-respected NYC/NJ-based indie label and producer, but we blew it. I studied bass at West Virginia University. I left the program in 1998 to join Kind Insight’s “Looking West” tour in 1998 (a better music education). I played bass and guitar with a bunch of bands in Morgantown, WV between ’95 and ’01. In ’00 I formed PoCKetScHWa with Chris Kasper and moved to Philly. We played for a couple years between NYC and Baltimore before injury and geographic relocation got in the way. Then I went to grad school.

I bought my first four track in ’95 on a credit card I would pay off for the next several years. I still have it. It barely works, but it’ll play some of those old tapes. I used that four track until I got a digital eight track in ’06 on a credit card I would pay off over the next couple weeks (I was an adult). I love proper studios, but I really love four-track bedroom pop culture. Cornslaw Industries is founded on this love.

I do a lot these days with prepared, altered, homemade, and wrong instrumentation. I record with and perform on prepared guitars and basses, light sensitive oscillators, bent toys, mis-wired electronics, no input mixers, contact mic’d objects, bowed and struck metals, casios, pedals, a cracklebox, a computer-based sampler, and a theremin.