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Member since: 6/14/2007 • Forum posts: 41770 • Last visit: 11/20/2024 12:16:06 PM EST
Location: Sea of Peas

I was born in Abington, Pennsylvania in 1969 and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My first exposure to progressive rock was hearing the heartbeat on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon when I was quite young. I remember how cool the helicopters on "On the Run" sounded and this may very well have had a significant impact on my leaning towards progressive rock as opposed to other forms of music. Later, like most youngsters in their teens, I spent all my money at used record stores acquiring everything I could find that was "different." This led me to discover the greats of the 1970s, like Yes and Genesis and countless others.

Unfortunately for me, my teen years were in the 1980s when progressive rock had almost completely disappeared and although I was interested in the newest stuff from the "dinosaurs," somehow it left me feeling empty and since then, these albums have not aged well at all. While studies in college took up most of time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had basically lost touch with music. A few years after I had graduated, I began exploring record stores again and slowly rediscovered my prog roots and began uncovering some of most adventurous new releases I had ever heard. Bands like Anekdoten, Porcupine Tree, Spock's Beard, The Flower Kings, and many others, were finding their way into my CD player. What a wonderful time to be living in during the new wave of progressive rock bands.

These new bands have inspired me to even create my own music, composing my very own progressive rock on a computer. I can't play an instrument, but I spend a lot time composing weird crap and noodling around on mid-priced digital audio workstations (what used to be called sequencers). Since 1999 I have been releasing weird stuff semi-annually under the name "Superluminal Pachyderm." I don't know how to describe it. I remember reading a review back in the early 2000s that described my early stuff as sounding like taking Thomas Dolby and Frank Zappa and putting them in a neo prog band with like Curly Howard or Abe Vigoda or something. I've been listening to more complex stuff in recent years and I think some of that has rubbed off on some of my more recent stuff. It's still weird though. All my stuff is on Bandcamp, so head over and give it a listen. You might want to take a tranquilizer. Don't take it too seriously. It's just a hobby of mine.

I also have an "electronic soundscape" project under the name "Amalgamated Hippopotamus" which had its beginnings back in 2007, but for whatever reason, I forgot I had the project (even had a website for it all these years). The hippopotamus woke up in 2019 and mostly it's a deconstruction of my SP project into these long "soundscapes." I'm not familiar enough with the electronic genres to even know how to classify it. Sometimes it's like noise, and sometimes it's a droning sound, and echoed things and stuff. It's weird like all the other stuff I do.

Besides my interest in progressive rock, I am a digital access and metadata specialist for a major university library. I know more about the ancient MARC format than I care to admit. Without going into details, I'm mostly responsible for a portion of the e-books that get loaded into my library's catalog and I also provide metadata to the Library of Congress for books that haven't yet been published. I write XSLT metadata crosswalks, scripts, and macros that do neat little things (that only I care about) when necessary and provide computer support when no one else is looking. I also contribute a lot of metadata to Wikidata. Prior to this I created metadata for rare books, manuscripts, archival collections, realia, and 19th century toys and games. I'm well versed in at least a dozen metadata schemas and thesauri used by libraries that no one else in the world knows about.

Somewhere in the distant past I acquired college degrees in astronomy/astrophysics and computer science and minored in history. I read a lot of astronomy books, science fiction, alternate histories, etc. I was a collector of local postage stamps and stamps from places that don't exist, but that hobby has sort of been on the backburner for a long time. I self-published a book of poetry back in 2007. A lot of that stuff ended up being turned into lyrics for the Superluminal Pachyderm project. Genealogy is a big interest in recent years. Ancestors were chiefly from Northern Ireland/Scotland, Germany, Polish Galicia, England, and Alsace.

I beep a lot, and sometimes I honk and toot. Once in awhile I'll pop like a coffee pot. I'm open to conversations about toilets and will gladly fart for people if they ask nicely.

Sub-genre Nb of reviews Avg rating 1 Symphonic Prog 97 3.18 2 Crossover Prog 60 2.67 3 Psychedelic/Space Rock 38 3.34 4 Heavy Prog 33 3.58 5 Neo-Prog 23 3.52 6 Prog Related 21 2.24 7 Progressive Metal 9 3.44 8 Eclectic Prog 5 4.00 9 Jazz Rock/Fusion 2 4.00 10 Proto-Prog 1 4.00 11 Rock Progressivo Italiano 1 4.00 12 Various Genres 1 2.00 13 Prog Folk 1 4.00 14 Zeuhl 1 4.00 15 Canterbury Scene 1 3.00