Submitted By: trocknroll

Genre: House

Date of Set: Jul 2005

Filesize: 115.16 MB

Total Downloads: 0

have been making mixtapes and CDs for the last 15 years or so. I make as many copies as I can, and I give them to just about anybody I know that loves music. I have made a lot of great friends this way and I think I've managed to touch people's lives in some way. If you love music like I do, you will understand this.

It is my hope to one day have every single mix tape or CD that I have ever recorded archived here on this site. I have managed to gather the majority of them already. But I still have more to transfer, a gang of which are old cassettes, which will take some time. I will add them to the site as they get transferred

If you dig it, keep checking back, as I usually make a new mix about once every couple months. Sometimes more frequently. These days, I make a lot of house mixes, a few disco classics mixes, and a few big Hip Hop/Reggae joints every year.

have been consumed with typography and illustration for pretty much as long as I can remember.

I started painting signs and outdoor murals for beer money when I was 13. I had my own punk rock fanzine at 14, mastering the finer nuances of press-on Letraset type and the baflfling brain-twister that is double-sided xeroxing. Around the same time I started doing flyers and posters for local punk clubs and my own band, Sluggo (we ruled, BTW).

I moved to NYC after high school to attend Pratt Institute and become a hip hop DJ. Punk rock DJs were creepy old guys with tight black jeans and beer guts, and punk as a culture had pretty much jumped the shark in the mid-80s, at least for me. When C-grade actors were slam-dancing on an episode of Quincy, and Clash Tshirts were being sold at the mall right next to Phil Collins Tshirts, the writing was on the wall. I desperately needed new music that could still scare my parents. Thank god for Public Enemy.

But I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah. Art student and Hip Hop DJ. That plan worked out pretty well on both fronts. After college, I was a little burnt out on graphic design, so I took a few years off, DJing in clubs, staying up all night, and drinking a lot of single malt scotch. I also worked in a recording studio and toured with a Haitian band, Vodu 155 (we almost ruled, but alas, no), as their DJ.

By 1996, the graphic design itch was getting really bad, so I joined EyeballNYC as a designer, knowing almost nothing about animation and motion graphics. Limore Shur had started the company 3 years earlier in his apartment in Brooklyn. He brought on fellow Pratt Alumnus Daniel Fries, and together we built EyeballNYC in to one of the nation’s leading motion graphics boutiques. We designated a founding principle that would guide us in to the future: Concept should drive design, not the other way around. A simple mantra, for sure, but an effective one. To this day, I return to it in my design work time and time again.

As luck would have it, this was a crucial moment in time for us to jump in to the motion graphics market. First, the entire industry was still in a relatively fledgling state, with only a handful of vanguard companies setting the standards. Larger design houses such as Pittard Sullivan and Lee Hunt had only recently begun taking television design work out of the networks and post production houses, and bringing it back to where it rightly belonged, with graphic designers. Secondly, desktop computers and animation software had finally reached the point where they were extremely affordable and more than capable of generating broadcast-ready graphics. And thirdly, Cable TV networks were exploding exponentially, creating an ever-growing need for graphics of all sorts.

Within a year or so, our work for cable networks started to get noticed by a few of these bigger shops, who began farming out work to us. This continued for another year, until we started competing against those same shops for jobs, at which point they promptly stopped calling us.

We moved to Lafayette & Broome in Soho in 1997, taking over an old sweatshop, and cramming in as many designers and animators as the work demanded. Things really took off from there, and we found ourselves involved in bigger and broader projects than ever before, with a lot of repeat business from loyal clients with whom we built great working relationships.

I left EyeballNYC in 2000 to work at Shooting Gallery as a creative Director in the new cross-media advertising agency they were developing. I think the big buzz word was “convergence”. When is that arriving again? Don’t want to miss that boat! I was there for a year and a half, working on brand identities, motion graphics, web design, web content, TV commercials, and film trailers. Shooting Gallery was a great learning experience, and a helluva lot of fun. Also a great life lesson in shady corporate practices and extravagant spending via unlimited strip club Buffalo wings (I wish I was kidding). A year and a half later, the internet bubble burst, imploding the company, and setting me free to pursue other interests.

I took some time off, freelanced a bit, and worked on a TV pilot for about a year called Kung Faux. We took terrible Hong Kong Kung Fu movies from the 70s and overdubbed them with NY rappers. I created the pilot episode from scratch: editing the films, directing the talent, doing the sound design, music, and all graphics and post production. The pilot got us a deal with Tommy Boy Films. I completed the entire first season of the show (10 episodes) and then moved on. The show was picked up by the Fuse network and elsewhere overseas. They are currently in negotiations for a movie and graphic novel based on the series.

I began freelancing back at Eyeball in early 2002. Things were going great, and within 6 months I rejoined the full time staff as Associate Creative Director.

I remained at Eyeball up until October 2006, working with Limore, their amazingly talented staff, and a wonderful extended family of freelancers. We grew steadily and managed to consistently produce work that challenged and inspired us. I am immensely proud of the contributions I made there. We fought constantly to avoid being pigeon-holed, and we insisted on never resting on any one particular style. We accomplished this again and again by returning to that founding principle: concept must drive design, not the other way around; words that I will continue to apply in my work as my future unfolds.

In the pic he is the guy on the RIGHT - Jules Gayton is on the left(FYI).

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