Justin Robert

Hi, my name is Justin and I like make music. I play drums, guitar, bass, synthesizer, sing (sometimes), and am a home recording nut.

As a drummer I've won a few awards and performed with national and world-wide acts as well as professional theatre. I won first place in local and the North East regional finals for Guitar Center's "Drum off" in 2001. I Recently Performed at Busch Gardens on drum set as well as hand percussion for 4 months in the dance show "Burn the Floor". In 2006 I played the Drummer in FST's presentation of Hedwig & The Angry Inch, where I not only played drums, but was a character in the play which was a lot of fun. I'm pretty much self taught. I did take lessons for a year when I was 10, but learned most of my drumming by just playing as much as possible.

In recent days I've been focusing on Brazilian drumming and percussion. I play the Tan Tan and recently bought a pandeiro, though I'm still struggling with it considerably :p

As a composer I try to change it up all the time. If you go check out my recordings and click on more than just one, you'll hear some really different sounds on almost every recording. Some of it is ambient and peaceful, some of it is avant-garde, some of it is even kinda pop. I have a new project in the works where I am fusing traditional Brazilian sounds and rhythms with modern electronic, experimental and even a little dance music. I'm really excited about it and I have found some really great vocalists and collaborators that are going to make the album something very special indeed. 

While I've been working on the Brazilian project I was talking about above, I picked up an old Casio CZ-3000 synthesizer and fell in love with the sounds I could get out of it. It uses something called Phase Distortion to create very complex sounds. This system is quite unique and sounds very rich. If you ever come across one, just forget the presets, the synth is capable of so much more. You take a base waveform then offset the phase read angle to mangle to waveform into something else. You can also use envelopes to make them morph over time. Once I figured out how to program it, I created some patches that were very oldschool ambient sounding, like vintage Steve Roach or Klaus Schulze recordings. I spaced out for hours until 4 in the morning playing the awesome sounding patches then woke up the next day and recorded about 70 some minutes worth, probably producing one of the most pure ambient recordings I have ever done. All of the audio on "1986" is the CZ-3000 with no external fx or overdubs, its pure synthesizer music. Check it out here.

I also run a little netlabel called Lunar Flower that releases ambient music from various corners of the world. www.lunarflower.us