Ryan Xristopher's Tiny Homepage

My name is Ryan Xristopher. I'm a musician. I love the process of unlocking sound, and my production efforts all try to point to this. I'm currently based out of Seattle, but geography doesn't feel so important anymore, technology seems to have connected us all ...

My earliest influences were classical piano, and later I played trumpet in a marching band, and eventually took up the guitar at the beginning of high school.

My idea of what music was changed in 1998 when I went to my first rave in Detroit. After that, during my freshman year in college, more windows to the electronic music sound opened when some friends played a few Juno Reactor tracks for me. Somewhere along the line I picked up Keoki's "Disco Death Race 2000" because of it's shiny packaging. I still have that CD.

I joined the Navy in 2000 and was stationed in Everett, Washington, and that was the year I went to my first rave in Seattle at NAF Studios. Monk was playing that night.

For the next four years, I went to every electronic music show that I could in the Seattle area when I wasn't working or out to sea on the aircraft carrier. In 2001, I bought a pair of Technique 1200's and a Pioneer 500 mixer so that I could bring my music with me when the ship was in the Gulf.

I would set up my little rig with modified computer speakers and play on a card table during the night when no one was in the office I worked in. On our semi-holidays off, I would lug everything out to the flight deck and play records. Those were the years that I was learning to DJ.

In 2002, when I turned 21, my horizons changed again when I started being able to go to clubs. Instead of rave music, it became House, Techno, Breaks, Drum & Bass. Genres defined themselves by the night in three and four hour groups instead of the 9-hour all night events I was used to.

In 2004-2006, I went to Club Element almost every Friday for 2 years during it's heydey. That was one of the golden periods of music in the Seattle area for techno-heads who wanted to see some of the best artists in the world, not just the most popular ones.

In 2004, I decided to be more serious about the production side of electronic and club music, and so I started a record label, Confined Media, with Courtney Rickett (Hazel LaLanne) and Gabe Spiel (DJ Aku) and we started collecting the gear we needed to start production work.

Logic 7.2 on a Mac G5, as many turntables, mixers, CD decks, samplers as you could shake a stick at. I had my parents ship my guitars out here from Michigan and bought a few others to finish my collection. I bought every book I could about how to Logic worked, subscribed to every magazine we could afford, and away we went.

Five years later Confined Media has a few more members including Andrew Cox, a producer and DJ (and currently the defacto mastering engineer for Further Records); Jason LeMaitre, an extreme successful Seattle DJ; Nicholas Potter, a visionary artist; Jeff Ackley, our favorite party thrower; and Josh Carpenter, our brilliant live sound technician and speaker expert.

We're scattered up and down the West Coast right now, but our long-term mission is the same, to bring the best music, the best permormances, and the best sound to everyone who wants to hear it.