Spiralfusion used to be my business name when I made jewelry. It was a literal description of the main element of my jewelry, a spiral made out of copper or silver wire which I fused into a solid mass. I no longer make jewelry but the domain name, spiralfusion.com, has been repurposed for my electronic music. The name Spiralfusion has now come full circle. Before I used it for jewelry, the name was used a jazz fusion band in the UK who previously registered spiralfusion.com.

I started doing electronic music in 1987 when I took a class in electronic music at City College of San Francisco. I thought it was going to be just a history of electronic music but it was a full hands on class on making electronic music with a music lab that had two Serge modular synthesizers, an Emu Emax, a Yamaha DX7, a Tascam 1/2″ 8 track reel to reel recorder along with a mixing board and other assorted gear. I had no real background in music but I did in electronics and I didn’t have the issues understanding the technology some of the other students had and neither did I come to it with any preconceived ideas or bands or genres that influenced me. I had no music inside my head that I wanted to do electronically, I just let myself be carried to wherever the equipment would take me as I experimented with it. I was mainly studying visual arts at the time and that influenced how I did the music. I started buying synthesizers and tape recorders and doing electronic music at home. I’ve been doing it on and off ever since. For the last few years it has been more on than off. A lot of the time I work with structures from traditional and popular music and I’m perfectly capable of doing them on acoustic instruments. I love my guitars as much as my synthesizers and drum machines but I’m much more a composer and producer than a performing musician. My art and jewelry background makes me much more inclined to stay home and make something than go out and perform.

So I could consider Spiralfusion to be my virtual music label and I have a virtual band to go with it called the Prophets. One of the synthesizer loves of my younger days was for Sequential Circuit’s Prophet synthesizers and I bought several of them and these synthesizers are the basis of my sound. Compared to what came later they are raw and direct and there’s more than a touch of psychedelia in their sound. That psychedelic edge is in a lot of synthesizers from the 1960s to the early 1980s. It persisted with Sequential until their end in 1989.