Max Deadroom

I've been making things with sound for over twenty years. It started with music — always music — and spread outward into audio engineering, film scoring, instrument design, generative composition, creative code, visual art. The tools changed constantly. The impulse didn't.

For a long time I thought I was building toward a specific destination: an academic career, a tenure track, a place at the front of a lecture hall. I had the degree, the experience, the conviction. Then I looked clearly at where that road was going — not with bitterness, but with the kind of honesty that only comes after years of moving in too many directions at once — and I chose differently.

I moved back to Columbus, Ohio, my hometown. Returning gave me something I hadn't expected: permission to stop treating the breadth of my interests as a problem to solve. Twenty years of chasing sound into film, code, visual art, hardware, pedagogy — that's not a lack of focus. That's a method. It just took a while to trust it.

The work that feels most alive: making art, and creating conditions where others can make it too. Not as a service. As a practice. I am most myself when I am building a thing or helping someone else find theirs — those two states, alternating, constitute most of what I consider a good day.

My practice sits at the intersection of sound, code, and image — usually in that order, often all at once. I work with modular synthesis and VCV Rack for composition, p5.js and Magic Music Visuals for audio-reactive visual art, and whatever combination of tools the piece requires. I am drawn to process as content: the patch, the improvisation, the system that surprises its author.

I make music under the name Max Deadroom. I make visual art under the same name. I am not particularly interested in separating them. The sound informs the image. The image informs the sound. The site you're looking at is built on the same logic.

I have been an audio engineer, a record producer, a filmmaker, a videographer, a sound designer, a lecturer, an instrument builder, a creative coder, a community organizer. I am not listing these as credentials. I am listing them as evidence of a single stubborn preoccupation: what does it mean to make something, and how do you get better at it?

I spent two decades becoming expert in a craft that technology is now capable of approximating cheaply and at scale. I have complicated feelings about this, and I don't think pretending otherwise serves anyone. What I've concluded — provisionally, honestly — is that the irreplaceable parts of creative work have always been the human parts: the judgment, the care, the relationships, the willingness to be changed by what you make. I'm interested in those parts. I work in fields where they still matter. I will keep making things by hand.