But I’ve been calling myself Professor Kliq.

For at least five years now I’ve gone by this moniker, if just for fun. It doesn’t really mean a whole lot, other than it being in the vein of the name “DJ Professor K” from “Jet Grind Radio” on the Sega Dreamcast. Perhaps that’s a good enough introduction – knowing that I’ve given myself a pseudonym after an esoterically stylish and relatively unpopular video game.

Technically, I suck at music.

My first instrument was the upright bass. I started in fourth grade when I was ten years old and dropped it (quite literally) when I was twelve. I hated taking lessons, I hated practicing and, above all, I hated recitals. I would deliberately leave my bow for days without applying rosin just so it would glide across the strings, barely making a sound. I would go completely unnoticed in every concert and that’s the way I intended to keep it.

It was the only extracurricular activity in which I ever (voluntarily) participated in school. My parents thought I was giving up, but really I was just changing focus. I think it was the summer of fifth grade that I went to Florida for two weeks to visit my Grandfather, an accomplished jazz musician who went by the name “Sir John”. At his flat in Bonita Springs he had this double-stack digital organ with bass pedals, accompaniment and pre-programmed rhythm patterns, as well as a whole slew of different sounds. You should have seen it, at least through my eyes… this glowing control center of sound and rhythm, by which only one person was expected to operate. I was completely unaware that this kind of access to music-making existed.

I was just playing around.

For two weeks straight I sat for hours in his tiny music room. Well, it wasn’t tiny… he had a baby grand piano and a large, glorious golden vibraphone. I appreciated those instruments too, but I took to the organ a lot more. Its majesty lied beyond the keys, for it was clear to me that they were only a part of the critical mass. I made little tunes and melodies… learned what a chord was, learned what a progression was and the first scale I taught myself was dorian in D. I had no idea that’s what the name was, but I thought it was fantastic.

And I played around some more.

When I came home from my grandfather’s, the first and only thing on my Christmas wish list was a digital keyboard. Around this time I had decided to stop playing upright bass and switched to teaching myself the piano. It was a shitty Casio keyboard with the shitty sound set we all remember, but while it still makes me cringe when I hear it, I also hear some of my roots… because, while it wasn’t anything in comparison to my Grandfather’s double-stack organ, it was mine – and I learned that machine inside and out. I would steal my brother’s cassette recorder and lay it on top of the crappy speakers and record my little inventions. Those tapes don’t exist anymore and probably for a good reason.

I was around twelve or thirteen when my mother bought our first family computer. It was an off-white Dell with a Pentium II processor, 400mhz at that, 128KB of RAM and a 12GB hard drive. Within the first couple of days of having this state-of-the-art machine, I realized that it wasn’t really any different than my shitty Casio keyboard. If anything, it was infinitely more capable of creating music, albeit the lack of piano keyboard keys, which, by this time, held significantly less meaning to me. Piano keys were just the way to access the machine, after all. A friend of mine gave me a copy of ACID Music 1.0 and I took to it like flies to shit. It came as no surprise and it pissed my mother off to no end. Luckily, spending so much time at a computer forces you to become extremely familiar with the way they work, so I also became my family and friends’ IT specialist (which has its pros and cons).

Ten years later, I’m still just playing around.

I found out what the internet was and how it related to music. Actually, looking back, I think I really found the internet and music at the same time. Actually that’s not true. I started listening to Beck and Oingo Boingo (because my older brother did) and two years later I found the internet. Once I found the internet, I also found guys like DJ Krush, DJ Shadow, The Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk. My Mother was listening to anything from David Sanborn to Madonna to Orgy to The Crystal Method to The Prodigy when I was young, as well as some La Bouche, MARS or AB Logic. Oh yeah and I loved the Yaz album… I think it was called “Tom’s Apartment” – it was the one where there were weird manikins and it had that track “Move Out” on it.

What was I talking about?

Oh right – so there was the internet. I realized that I could put music that I made up on the internet and people could listen to it, so I started posting on ACID Planet, then MySpace… and then, a few years ago, my buddy Dan Costalis showed me something called “Creative Commons” and a site called “Jamendo”. You could say, from here, the rest is history.

So, all of my work is free.

I used to have dreams of being a huge, famous and rich rock star… but somewhere in my twenties I started caring more about people hearing what I did rather than making money off of it. If there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that you never know whose hands your work will end up in if its free and on the internet. I’ve worked on so many projects and had music used in so many videos and productions, that I had to make a separate page for it on this site. I’m not going to tell you what style of music I make because it’s always a moot point. Okay, it’s electronic, but probably because it’s created and performed on a computer. I’m not a DJ, but some people think I look like one. Somehow I’m almost done with a degree in music composition at Columbia College Chicago, though I still technically suck at music. Every week I get emails from people all over the world, thanking me for all of the free music. I wish there was some better way to thank them for listening besides just saying “thank you” in a reply. I suppose the only way I know how is to keep making music for them.

I love movies and video games and the music that’s in them. I love seafood and mayonnaise, especially when they’re together. I’m always listening to music, even when I’m not. I love listening more than I love making it, of course.

I’ve run out of things to say, really. I’m really happy in life. I don’t just make music, I’m also a junior developer at Dom & Tom Inc. I live in Chicago and I love it here. My girlfriend Karen is amazing.

I fight back tears when I perform and I smile for days after a good show.

Someone asked me a few months ago what my secret was… and I answered without hesitation:

Do what you love and keep good company, you lucky bastard.