I’ve spent decades moving between stages, studios, edit rooms, websites, tour vans and the stranger corners of the music business. The job titles have changed. The instinct never really has: build something, make it work, and leave it better than I found it.
I’m a New York-based drummer, musician, producer and digital creator. Over the years I’ve also worked in music marketing, video production, front-end web development and user experience consulting.
Those things may look unrelated on paper. They aren’t. They are all different versions of the same problem: how do you connect an idea with an audience and make the experience hit harder?
I’ve done that behind a drum kit, behind a camera, inside an edit, on a tour, in a marketing room and inside a browser window.
Not a straight career path. A long chain of useful obsessions.
Live performance, touring, studio work, production and the obsessive details that turn rhythm into identity. The drum kit has been the most consistent thread through everything.
Video, audio, content creation, photography and storytelling. I started video blogging before YouTube became the default place to do it, and I’ve never really stopped documenting.
Music-industry marketing, websites, UX, audience building and solving the unglamorous technical problems that usually stand between a good idea and a working one.
Worked in marketing for Wax Trax! Records and TVT Records, then as Director of Marketing at Gig Records.
Auditioned on drums for Nine Inch Nails on my 21st birthday. I did not get the gig. Still a pretty good birthday story.
Original drummer in the influential German industrial band and KMFDM offshoot Slick Idiot.
Started video blogging with The Trials of Being Mike, before YouTube became the cultural machine it is now.
Worked as a core member of the pre-production and post-production team on the twice Grammy-nominated R. Kelly: Trapped in the Closet series.
Created and hosted a politics and technology podcast while continuing music, media and digital work.
After returning to heavy touring and live performance, the current chapter includes En Esch and a North American run behind the kit with Raymond Watts’ PIG.
Born in New York City and shaped by a life spent bouncing between music scenes, cities and creative disciplines.
Auditioned for MTV’s Total Request Live co-VJ slot in the late 1990s. Lost to Jesse Camp. History is weird.
Had short-lived auditions or tryouts with projects including Celldweller and A Pale Horse Named Death. Not every story ends with a laminate.
Played bass with New York band Absinthee, created by producer Gordon Raphael.
Spent significant stretches living in Nashville and Baltimore before returning to New York.
Music, technology, photography, politics, design, recording, old gear, new tools. Curiosity is probably the actual job.
Sometimes that means a drum part. Sometimes it means a broken website. Sometimes it means a tour workflow, an edit, a campaign, a recording chain or a room full of people who need the same information at the same time.
Different tools. Same instinct.
“Michael is a joy to work with. I hired him as a second shooter on a concert video and am glad I did. He's fun to be around, knows how to troubleshoot, and did everything I asked and more. I recommend him highly!”
In 2026 I’m back where a lot of this began: behind a kit, on the road, inside the industrial music world. But now I’m also documenting the process, building the archive and creating ways for the people I meet along the way to become part of it.
The PIG tour isn’t a nostalgia lap. It’s another chapter.
No algorithm required.