Ned Shepard
Aged 14, someone put a pair of headphones on my ears with Underworld's Born Slippy playing. Nine minutes later I knew that somehow electronic music was going to be a big part of my life. Skipping ahead two years, I found myself in France and saw that the music I was slowly falling in love with was everwhere. Faithless was on MTV Europe, music festivals were everywhere, and I went to my first party and was hooked. I came back, bought a synth, took a break on my jazz, blues, and classical piano training and starting writing and DJ'ing.
Six years later, I am still writing and DJ'ing. In between then and now, I met Marcus Andrews at Full Sail recording school in Orlando and we began producing together under the alias Digital Witchcraft. We stayed up late, talked about the world, listened to Northern Exposure cd's and decided that we wanted to hear more melodic music again. We spent a month writing Pocket Universe, the first of six original releases and several remixes we did in the next two years on labels across Canada and the US. We commuted back and forth between Montreal, where I was at school, and his home in Atlanta, becoming more and more encouraged with our new sound as Dj's such as Nick Warren, Dave Seaman, and Jonathan Lisle started supporting our music. We also started DJ'ing parties in Montreal and Atlanta and had the pleasure of playing with some great DJ's such as Sander Kleinenberg, Max Graham, James Zabiela, and Desyn Masiello. Our featured artist set from Proton radio has received over 13,000 downloads from Hybridized.org and we still receive countless emails from people around the world.
In the fall of 2002, I also met Ossama Al-Sarraf (aka Sultan) in Montreal after I handed him a demo of some of my tunes at a club. After a special birthday remix and countless hours listening to records together, we thought it would be a good idea to write some music together, and so Jiva was born. Fortunately, our first release, Strange Dimensions, was picked up by John Digweed's label Bedrock Records (the ambient mix of the tune was later included on the Layered Sounds 2 compilation in 2005). Six releases and two remixes later, our newest tunes, Connected featuring Stereomovers and Together We Rise, have been picked up by Deep Dish's label Yoshitoshi and are featured on Sharam's latest mix CD, Global Underground 29: Dubai.
Most recently, I have been very fortunate to work in the studio with the very talented former singer of Iio, Nadia Ali. In the winter of 2007, Nadia kidnapped Sultan and I in her NYC studio. Locked up with nowhere to go, we decide to co-write (and eventually produce) several songs for her upcoming solo album, to be released later this year. Soon afterwards, I was invited to play keyboards in her fantastic live show on its endless tour around the Middle East, Europe and Central America. So take a listen to the tunes, let me know what you think, and enjoy the music. peace Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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