Born in Seattle in1976, I started playing piano at the age of six. At nine, I began teaching myself percussion – any surface became a drum as I beat on it with wooden kite sticks that I would pretended were drum sticks. I had a small tape recorder that I would used to record my piano playing and the percussive sounds. I'd would press the buttons down halfway to slow down the sound, or put tape over the erase head to "overdub" my tracks.

I first learned of circuit bending while attending college for sound engineering. An instructor of mine had organized a club that made these Speak and Math toys make strange, glitchy sounds. I started reading up, talking to other benders, slowly building my workshop in my bedroom. My favorite part of bending is finally coming across that magic bend after poking around for hours – the one that causes Elmo to sound like a death metal singer or Furby to speak a garbled alien language.

My projects represent the liberating of sounds from these electronics, beyond anything the manufacturers intended or imagined. I enjoy working with vintage toys, which gives my works a feeling of simultaneously familiar and alien.