Artist description Los Angeles singer-songwriter with a taste for beats, bruises and the occasional crunch.

Music Style Trip POP

Musical Influences Placebo, Radiohead, Basement Jaxx, Zero 7

Artist History HISTORY HAVOK is the story of one man, two continents and 27 songs. It's the story of how life travels in circles. It’s about after-hours clubs, and trip pop, it’s about late night jams and far-away destinations. 1993- Summer. Sent to London by Benny Me dina and Reprise Records to work with the rock band, Stress on songwriting and lyrics for their 2nd record. I live in a council flat with Stress's bassist, Mitch Agugua in West London. Ladbroke Grove, the part of London that we are living in, is alive with ambient, electronic and world music and I spend most of my free time in the Rough Trade record shop looking for hard-to-find records and having the occasional, surreal musician moment – soup with Brian Eno, watching a penguin documentary with Sinead O’Connor. Later that year, Stress and I end up choosing Mark Opitz (who's just coming off of producing INXS's last record) to produce Stress’s next album and in the fall we begin recordings at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studio in Box, England. The recording s are difficult as we begin to split off into 2 different camps: the futurists who want to make a dance/rock record and the traditionalists who want to make "music for housewives.”At night I begin to sneak out and go over to a smaller adjacent studio where I experiment with the beats I had found on the records I bought at Rough Trade. 1994- I return to Los Angeles determined to begin my own recordings. I begin hanging out in David Hauser's studio. (David is a guy I met while working with Stress. He had met Mitch at some party and had offered us his studio.) He encourages me to continue my own recordings. I then meet Tanya Robinson at his studio one day and we hit it off instantly. We work together on my first CD entitled, "More."It contains sound experiments started at Real World as well as three new tracks. Later that year, I return to London to help Stress finish their record. We then return to LA for mixing and shortly after, Warner goes through a big restructuring and Stress’s record is shelved and later dropped from the Reprise label. A month later, feeling burned and burned-out, I leave LA and move to Munich, Germany for what I think will be a few months. 1994-1996- While working as a bartender in Munich I meet Grant Maiden (a fellow traveler) fr om New Zealand, and we begin to write songs together. We play some gigs with Grant on acoustic guitar and myself on vocals. I also meet producer, Yann Kuhlmann and we record a few tracks together. I begin to settle into my new life when Grant decides to r eturn to New Zealand. Less than a week after Grant's departure, David Hauser calls me from Jacksonville Beach, Florida and asks me if I would like to come and live with him and his wife Martha and son Aaron and record some new songs. I pack up and leave shortly there after. 1996 Spring to Fall- David and I begin to record "Eastern Standard Time," my second CD and for all the electronics we attempt to lay on each song, the thing that rises to the surface most in the final mix is the straight-ahead, angst-filled guitar work of Matt Lohngran. This gives "E.S.T." a much rockier sound than anything I had recorded up to that point. When the record is finished, I send it to Sophie Raml (a friend of mine at BMG music publishing in Germany) and she loves the record and offers me a music publishing deal. 1997 – While searching for a new producer I find some old recordings that Yann and I had done while I was previously in Munich. Amazed by the vitality of the recordings and Yann’s smooth ambient sounds I call him up late one night and we decide to continue our work. In August, after many false starts, we begin to find our flow and record "Euroboy" and many others. Sophie is thrilled by our new dark and layered sound. Yann and I come up with the phrase "bio-atmosph eric" as we aim to bring new life and texture to electronic music. The word Trip-pop is tossed around as a way to describe our music. 1998- I meet Dirk Baur at a party in Frankfurt. We hit it off right away and I later send him a CD of our music. He is s mitten and begins to make noises about signing us to his label. We do our first live show opening the broadcast of the World Cup finals in the center of Munich. The show is a smash. (There’s nothing quite like seeing your image projected from a video scre en the size of a small house.) Dirk introduces us to cool chap named Daniel Lieberberg, and together, they make us an offer but Yann and I have begun to have heavy rows over the direction Havok should take and eventually we part ways. I leave Munich for B erlin where I begin recording new songs with DJ SAM K and guitarist (and life long friend) Malte Hagemister. ("My Satellite" and “Somewhere Other” come from these sessions.) Later Dirk, Daniel and I meet in Frankfurt and the talks are positive but I decid e to fly to LA for the holidays. 1999- Back in California I decide to stay and not return to Germany and I spend the next year enjoying the coastline and writing poetry. I find new friends in LA and leave the nightlife and music business to those with mo re patience (and better sunglasses) than I. 2000- I begin recording again with Tanya in her studio in the hills above Pasadena. She helps me to find my way back into the music and we produce three new tracks: "I Don't Forget You," If Angel's Can Hear" and "Surrender." The recordings are easy and virtually tension-less as the decadence of “ZEROchild” is traded in for the soul-searching of “If Angel’s Can Hear.” 2001- HAVOKdirect.com goes online and I go back into the studio… And now, well, this is only the beginning…. See you on the other side of the screen, HAVOK

Instruments voice / BEATbox / acoustic GTR / piano / absynth / DP3

Albums Amsterdam (2002), Havok (2001)

Location Los Angeles, California - USA

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