I was born in Savannah, Georgia in the Fall of 1972. I spent my childhood in a small town in Alabama, beginning percussion and wind instruments in middle school. I began playing a standard trap kit at age 14, guitar at 12, bass at 14, and started drawing and painting at around age 12. I studied with local art teachers including Alvaro Lazo in high school, and briefly attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts as a freshman. I worked with half a dozen area musicians and musicians from Tuscaloosa playing guitar, bass, or drums. At age 18, I survived a high- speed car accident when the car I was a passenger in plummeted into a deep ravine outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

In 1991, I moved to San Francisco to enjoy the music scene and go to school. Between 1991 and 1994 I worked with a variety of musicians (a few of their sites are listed on my links page), usually playing bass or drums and sometimes singing. After a few years at City College, I transferred to the Art Institute, and did a semester of exchange in Paris. In 1992, I began working intermittently for sculptor Barry Schwartz, and went to Berlin in 1995 to help him while I was on exchange in Paris. After graduation in 1996, I began helping him plan shows in Brazil, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany and other countries. In 1996, I spent four and a half months living in London, and in 1997 spent five months living in Milan.

Since 1995 i have been atempting to learn Arabic rythyms on Doumbek, the multi-metered music of the Dagombe, and since 2002 the classical music of India. I also began learning upright bass on a Messenger bass in 1998, and made meager attempts to include instruments like hammered dulcimer, keyboards, jew's harp, didgeridoo, and any other type of drum in my friend's studio.

In 1999, while working for Manpower, I attended the Javafest in the Moscone Center and thereafter decided to expand my computer knowledge, studying alone after work and building an online portfolio with volunteer and subcontracted projects. I returned to the Bay Area in the summer of 2001 to work with Barry Schwartz and Arterial, and again in 2002 to upgrade the 187 recording studios and start two new bodies of work. Markus Hawkins and Ron Kutulas, both of whom I have worked with for more than a decade, contributed hours of time to this project. I've finished most of the lyrics on ten new tracks which combine elements of Reggae, dub, world music, and bluegrass, and hope to find the money to press and release 500 copies in the Bay Area when I finish recording. Additional copies will be available online via this website. During the summer of 2003, my hopeless obsession to understand the nature of space and time finally got the better of me, and I spent some time indulging in the texts listed on my cosmology page.

- Charles

January 3rd, 2006.