Well with the new album “Out of Orbit” the Alphanaut sound has really expanded and evolved in numerous ways. But the songs currently floating around from “The Lunar Age” EP and subsequent singles, the sequenced sound reflects my influences like Kraftwerk and Yello, partnered with guitar textures influenced by early Brian Eno. With the upcoming album I’ve spent the last six months really going after a much richer sound that I always envisioned for the Alphanaut. Most of the songs still revolve around sequences, though they are much more spatial and atmospheric. I wanted to meld a real vintage ‘70’s ‘art-rock’ vibe so you could feel some grit beneath the tunes. My engineer Ted Scarlett and I have been working hard to pull that off and I think it’s sounding pretty sweet!

The recording process for “Out of Orbit” has been both an amazing experience and a real battle. It’s the album I have wanted to record for over a decade, but never had the chance, and it’s been really fantastic to experience it forming in front of me. The battle has been both financial and of various stresses on a personal level. However, so many of the musicians I have worked with on the album have been kind enough to contribute their talents for free, as they really believe in the project and wanted to see it realized as much as me, that it’s made things evolve in ways I had only dreamt of. My good friends Jorge and Chavo Villanueva again contributed to advancing the Alphanaut sound, Jorge on drums and percussion and Chavo on guitars. Other musicians that contributed are, jazz bassist Ryan Roberts, pianist Larry Kutcher, jazz trumpeter William Bing and Ted nailed it on guitar for a few songs as well.

I have been recording music since my senior year in high school when I completed my first four-song demo. As with most artists’ first attempts at song writing, the tunes are pretty laughable and hard for me to listen to now. However I kept pressing on and took to the studio a couple more times to record my own material before deciding to join my first band as a singer. In Seattle, where I’m from, I went between a few bands, most of which I don’t remember the names of, as they never made it out of the ‘garage’.

A year or so later I moved to Los Angeles to pursue music but once again was disheartened at trying to land in the right project that had some stability. Since I wasn’t finding the band I was looking for I decided to form my own and get back to song writing. My first was with my friend Greg Stanton who played viola in a project I called ‘What Noise?’ which never really got off the ground, but we did join up with his friend Janet Pigott who eventually became my song-writing partner for a couple years. Janet and me splintered off and formed the band ‘Eleven Eyes’ with our friend Clint Yeager and created some really cool tunes. However, creative differences split that band a year later, leaving Janet and me to create something new. From there the band ‘November’ formed and we were joined by Alberto Campos on drums. Finally I found myself in my first real band with committed members. The six-year history of ‘November’ is pretty complicated but Janet wound up leaving, and Albert and I watched countless temporary members move in and out of the project. The final three years were pretty solid when Art Agunod on bass, Bob Barnett on keyboards and Graham McMurtry on guitars, joined up. However frustrations crept in and the band finally split. I was creatively drained and put music away for what I thought would be a short time, but unfortunately turned into ten years.

Right now it’s tremendously important, as it’s where I’m trying to build a grassroots following. Without a label behind an artist such as myself, the Internet is the one tool we have getting our music out to listeners and potential new fans. It is such an amazing new era for artists right now but you have to be inventive in the way you reach out to people. It’s certainly not easy, and I’m far from being where I want, but I’m excited to see simple things unfold. For the album I will be working with a great Rhonda at Rainmaker Public Relations and I’m really excited to see what comes of is working together.

That’s an interesting question. During the flood of songs that came out of me the last couple years, I still have some tunes left over that have more of a commercial ‘pop’ structure, however quite a few of them are more atmospheric and abstract. I really am at a crossroads at which direction to go. There are even sketches for a small group of songs that could tie into a ‘concept album’ if handled correctly. I’ve been thinking of aiming for something like what Kate Bush put together on ‘The Hounds of Love’, where the fist half are the singles and the last half are tied together loosely to tell a story. We’ll have to see what happens, but I’m sure it will once again be an exciting journey working things out.