origins
andy has been making music since his teens. starting with guitar as a source, he was soon fascinated by pedals and sonic experimentation, including bouncing noisy ambient soundscapes between two four tracks in his room and setting up an oscilloscope in his room to study sounds visually while still living at home in a three bedroom house with his dad, his stepmom, and his two half-brothers.

electronics take over
during college, his interest in electronically created or altered music and the huge potential of the gear grew into a passion. working at a video store and bumming money between checks in order to get his hands on ever more gear (at one time he had 19 guitars and basses, many customized and enhanced by late night garage sessions where wood and wires were transplanted between instruments), he had to step up to a more demanding job in order to get into the realm of drum machines and serious synths.

a calling in techno
after several years letting music become a smaller and smaller part of his life (and moving from los angeles to salt lake city and then san jose), he became exposed to the rave scenes of san francisco and los angeles, and his enthusiasm for the techno... specifically the music of projects like plastikman and labels like tresor and harthouse opened his eyes again to the power of music.

immersion
he began djing, and started to sell guitars and otherwise skeletonize his old production gear in order to make a proper techno ready studio. by 1997, he was djing almost every weekend, and doing sound reinforcement on those fridays and saturdays when he wasn't djing and working on tracks on the nights in between.

contact
in late 1999, andyw met chris jackson who had been introduced by a common friend in order to start a techno room at 'synthetic', a local weekly club. as two people who had continued to represent techno in a city that was all about trance, house and jungle; their views overlapped quite a bit and eventually chris heard a demo cd, containing the then unnamed track "cone6". after editing out an ending that included a shift into gabber category bpms, chris included it on his label's second sampler of silicon valley area artists (entitled 'silicon sampler ver 2.4').

recorded projects since include a collaboration with chris for a project entitled 'collective correspondence', a release on a local electro compilation, and an ep for the refined label.

mutor also can be heard as a live performance, with andy playing deconstructed minimal music from a constantly changing handful of gear including a moog synth, hand drums, 4-track tape recordings of found sounds recorded at the same event where he is playing and a notebook running various self constructed granular sampling tools. possibly reflecting his love for improvisation and the electricity of live collaboration, he performs often with others. he has performed live with Chris Jackson (djing), twerk (live on msp/notebook), the gamelan anak swarasanti (a balinese style gamelan group) as well as mixing live performance with his own djing.