Biography:

I grew up in an extremely musical family - Mom sings, Dad plays guitar and piano, Sis is an internationally known recorder player (Anne Timberlake). Everybody sings, really. From a very early age I came to appreciate great music, starting with Raffi and Rock. While I was initially put off by the simplicity and repetitiveness of early video game music, there was an undeniable draw to that particular acoustic pallette and the rich musical tradition surrounding and underlying it. And, let's face it, the early VG music world wasn't exactly known for its diversity, so we all learned to either tolerate the music or find something else to do with our time. Many of us even grew to like it.

Then the 16-bit era arrived with all the stealth and subtlety of a B-52; where did this sudden explosion of beautiful songs come from? From whence such sumptuous siren strains? I remember being utterly captivated by the music to Mario World, Mario Kart, and Metroid, the first three SNES games I ever owned.

32-bit was another step up, though nowhere near so dramatic. Around that time I started composing video game-inspired music in my head, and not long after that, on "paper" - like many electronic musicions of my generation, having not received a great deal of formal musical training, I couldn't notate music fast enough for written scores to be a plausible medium. Even the digital canvas I found frustratingly slow much of the time, but since they hadn't yet invented a machine to draw music directly from the brain, I did the best I could with what I had.

Although for some reason I considered myself a classicist at heart (in large part adolescent rage and rebellion at society's hypocrisy and corruption, partly the visceral revulsion I felt at being forced to listen to pop music on the bus every day), I did eventually escape many of elitism's snares and get well-acquainted with hip-hop and EDM. That was very formative, to say the least.

Music has always been a hobby of mine - only back in 2008 did I try to set myself up to make it as a musicion sans day job. I failed miserably, but the period spawned two albums and - eventually - the reluctant and resentful realization that you have to spend at least as much time talking to people and marketing yourself as you do making music in order to get anywhere. Or if YOU don't, someone does. And you'll likely need to pay them.

Anyway, nowadays I'm out to enjoy myself and bring joy to others. I'm not at all opposed to having some good clean fun, as sadly I find today's music is increasingly less good, less clean, and - ultimately - less fun.

-Ryder Timberlake (Spiral Cheese Horizon)