Personal Statement

I make electronic music that I describe to myself as Electric Pop Opera with an intense, atmospheric, and controlled sound. In 2025 I finished one album composed on synth and performed on a club-standard CDJ/mixer DJ rig. I'm completing the second now using digital production and virtual instruments. Last year I began releasing singles and a mini EP called Alone in the Desert. This summer I'll record new hour-long DJ sets under a fresh alias that mixes my own material with other artists.

The music started as a side project and merged into one of my main projects in summer 2026. There was so much to learn before my sound became the one I set out to build but after refinements and upgrading my process, everything has taken shape ahead of the upcoming 2026 singles.

All three creative domains: music, visual, and technology are relevant to me in 2026. I've spent around 15 years on each of these now as independent disciplines. By combining them into new performance formats, a type of performance art has emerged under my stage name, Exstellius.

It took years of bootstrapping to build sustainable revenue. My multi-disciplinary experience now serves enterprise clients while also advancing my own projects. Investing in these creative projects is my main focus, and music has complemented this transition well.

At New Entity Operations™ I've spent over 10 years building custom data-exchange frameworks and open-standards infrastructure that now supports both enterprise clients and my own creative work. I skipped the centralized botnet approach used by many industry leaders in favor of a local-first AI approach that is directly integrated into live entertainment protocols. These human-designed systems run on the terms of both artists and venues, including digital-first live-streaming programs. Music meeting data distribution, along with real-time modification of event experiences, has become one of the more creative and promising parts of the practice.

I treat social media as an optional amplifier rather than a mission-critical infrastructure. The tools, technologies, and creative systems I've built exist on networks I designed, operate, and control. Open-source tools that began as personal instruments have evolved into real-time performance environments that others can also use.

2020–2024 was a time of rebuilding strength and doubling down on alignment. I made personal decisions to let go of relationships that were no longer aligned with the life I was building. People are allowed to have different plans and letting go isn’t about resentment; letting go is about love. "Let people live their own lives" was something I had to tell myself often during 2020 and 2021.

The work isn't finished once you improve yourself and reach your goals. This is only the first step toward building something bigger for others.

If you're curious to learn what my personal machine knows about me, read "Smoke's" Personal Statement