It's hard to know where to begin when talking about NEON APOCALYPSE. I suppose the best place to begin would be to go all the way back to my first band, The Waffle Senate.

In 1996, I co-founded a pop-metal band primarily comprised of Star Lake, NY residents called the 132nd Interstellar Waffle Senate. At the time, I was playing drums, and from what I remember, was pretty well known in the area for my playing ability. Though I very much enjoyed the music, and the work, I was not interested in the drug culture behind the scenes, nor was I very enthused about the idea that I wasn't getting a whole lot of songwriting input (this is mainly because I played drums - I didn't play MUSIC), and I was even less enthused that by the middle of 1997, after having recorded a demo in late 1996, we were putting music together that sounded redundant and repetative. It's not that there was no imagination, it's that it wasn't being put in the right places.

There was quite a bit of imagination in the band. After shortening our name to just the Waffle Senate, we toyed with ideas like swearing on a stack of Eggo Waffle boxes, or throwing fake dollars out to the live audiences, calling it "waffle dough". We each also had blue TV Service repairman outfits that had the name tags "Lloyd" on them, and in a couple shows, we all wore those shirts together as a band.

A lot of this stuff was coming from the collective minds of the band, but some of the most strange ideas would come from me. Enraptured by U2 and, at that time, what was the pinnacle of their career, ZOOTV, I wanted to find new ways to put on great shows that seemed and felt much bigger and brighter than the venues they were in. Today, this is still something I'm trying to achieve - finding ways to put on mind-blowing shows, make them look "expensive" but really be doing it for nearly no money at all.

Ah, there I go off on a tangent. My point is, I was realizing I had a large imagination, and drumming just wasn't really doing the job for me. I wasn't getting the input I wanted - not necessarily due to anyone's intent - and I felt that what I had to say and do musically would really make a difference.

I don't know why I felt this way. I don't know what made me think I could play a musical instrument. At the time, I didn't even know what a chord was, and if I tried to play one of my bandmates' guitars, I was clueless.

Despite all that, I left the band in mid-late 1997. I decided that there was something clicking in my head. I didn't want to play drums anymore. I wanted to explore. Beyond that, I wanted to be in a position where I had way more influence - but not all of it. My intention was to still have a band, but instead, I went solo.

I wrote a lot of songs in those early days, and although some of them still exist today ("Echo Papa", "Lemon Tea", "I Could've Lost You" etc), most of them were pure rubbish. Perhaps they had some potential, but at the time I wasn't going to be able to find it. But by the end of 1997, I was ready to put some of this stuff down.

One of my former Waffle Senators - Grim - allowed me to borrow is 4 track casette recorder. I spent the next few months recording (doing my best to get through the ice storm of 1998 up here in Northern New York, which oddly enough, did not yield any new material but has to this date conjured up a lot of metaphorical content for my work), and finally released the early works of what I had done under the name Wiggins. (This was a nickname my fellow Waffle Senators had given me after I had explained the book "Ender's Game" to them). The demo was called "Lemon Tea" and contained early versions of that track, "Eleven-Three", "Echo Papa" and "I Could've Lost You". I unfortunately don't have a copy of this demo lying around anywhere, but that's okay, because by summer/fall of 1998, in my first year of college, I put some of these songs on a new demo called "The Ender of Something Beautiful". All the above tracks were there including some others, like "Goodbye", which was an earlier version of what would eventually become "Manipulation Under Stress". At this time, not overly happy with the name Wiggins, I changed my stage name to Ender, and it's been that way ever since.

That first semester of college, I had rejected taking any music classes because I really thought I knew everything I needed to know about music - that I knew what sounded good and I knew what sounded bad. I didn't know what I was going to do yet, but I knew I wasn't going to take any classes like that. I felt I was above it for some reason.

Two things changed that. In late 1998, I met someone via the internet who knows a lot about talent, and pop music, and knew exactly what to tell me to spur me forward. (I don't know if she saw potential then, because looking back, I think in retrospect all those recordings were AWFUL). She told me that I needed to push myself, to push my voice and SING rather than relatively SPEAK the music. She was right. Back then, I was singing in a very low key. In fact, when I was teaching myself how to sing before that, I was singing a whole octave lower than, say, Bono. After taking this information in, I started pushing my voice up a whole octave, (sometimes a whole register), or changing the keys of songs entirely (rarely). This was the first step in putting more emotion into the music.

The second thing that changed my attitude about taking music classes was the fact that after my first semester in college, I had less than a 2.0, and was quickly put on academic probation. I realized that if I were to get out of this cleanly, I would have to take some music classes, which I pretty much felt I could breeze through.

I could and I did, as I received a 4.0 in the music class I took the following semester, pulling myself out of academic probation. I also secured a place as a Teaching Assistance for the same class I just took for the following semester.

That summer of 1999, I tried putting together another band playing mainly the music I had written, and as the lead singer. By the time the summer was over, so was the band, as I realized that if I was going to get anything done, I would have to probably do it myself.

Regarding that first semester of my sophomore year, I also started taking an electronic music composition class. With this class, I got more experience in using digital recording software in the music lab, and quickly began recording my first album. At the time, it was going to be called LEMONYMOUS. So in late August 1999, I started recording LEMONYMOUS in the music lab at St. Lawrence University. I got myself a copy of Cool Edit Pro and quickly began additional work from my dorm room. But what I thought was going to be a quick recording production (I felt I would be done by spring 2000), turned out to be a two to two and a half year endeavor. The recording of the album was a crazy undertaking. I remember I didn't have a guitar amp, or an electric guitar - I had only my acoustic/electronic which I had purchased the summer before, which I plugged through my karaoke machine, with the echo and volume turned all the way up so that there was some distortion. Any other effects were processed with the Cool Edit Pro software itself.

I also used drum editing programs like Hammerhead, which was a free loop processing program, as well as Cubase VST, which I used to plug in strings and drums for songs like "Eleven-Three" and "Echo Papa" respectively. In fact, most of "Dogtown" was done with that program.

I was very green, and didn't really know much about what I was doing, which is why the songs honestly aren't EQ'd very well. I think they're mixed relatively decently, but the equalization leaved a lot to be desired.
By the spring of 2000, I had about 4 songs "done". I put that in quotes mainly because I would find they weren't at all. Regardless, I got a finished version of "Weak" played on a couple radio stations to some great reviews (mainly those of friends and family). I later re-recorded that song entirely for the album because I had completely deleted the session from my computer.

Speaking of sessions, back then I wasn't as organized. I used to save the separate .wav files from all the sessions on hard drives, then burn them to CD (a process I still do today), but instead of keeping everything organized according to session, I just sometimes randomly burned files to inappropriate CDs. For instance, there were probably 3 "Eleven-Three" session CDs, and some of them included pieces of files from "Lemon Tea" sessions.

I realized by late 2000, I wasn't going to have the work done like I had expected. I had done a lot of experimenting with songs like "Julia", which was going to take more work, and "Lemon Tea" still had a lot of parts that I felt weren't on key. I had had Grim come in to record parts and a solo for "Echo Papa", which at first I was going to omit because I didn't know if they fit, but later decided that they brought out another feel in the song.

As summer 2001 started turning into fall, I realized that in making my websites for the upcoming LEMONYMOUS album, I was also blatantly referencing U2. In fact, I was doing it so much that I was beginning to fear that people thought I was just plain ripping them off. I thought about changing the music, changing lyrics, starting everything over from scratch and just recreating the themes of the album right from the beginning. Instead though, I decided I had come too far, and it wouldn't make sense to literally erase 2 years of work. Instead, I kept the songs as they were developing, and didn't deviate from where they were going at all, but I changed the name from LEMONYMOUS to NEON APOCALYPSE. That change also convinced me to change the color themes from the LEMONYMOUS green and yellow, to the NEON APOCALYPSE blue and purple hues. I felt, in essence, the theme was kept intact regardless of the name change (basically the theme was that I was a nobody, who could just as easily be a rock star as anybody else, but no one knew who I was - with the title LEMONYMOUS, it was quite easy to understand, but with NEON APOCALYPSE, it was a little more complicated, but the intention was still clearly to blow minds), but now the blatant references were disappearing. You could still see who I was influenced by, even beyond U2, but now I felt it was easier to take the music for what it was FROM who it was.

This change completed, I finally finished and released the album in November of 2001. However, I realized that the songs were very "amateurish", something my own mother even commented on. They had no power behind them, and they lacked punch. Most engineers would tell you they weren't "mastered". So I did my best to go back and add the punch and power that the tunes lacked. At the same time, I made changes to the tunes that fixed problems like some equalization, and some parts that were clearly out of tune. In the process, however, I made a complete mess of my session saving and archiving, so that I literally, at this point, have about 30+ CD's of files and sessions from that album alone. (by comparison, SCARLET DAWN has only about 15). This work was released with a new cover in the spring of 2002, on my mp3.com website, and was reviewed by a student at SLU's resident student paper, The Hill News. (4 1/2 stars out of 5 by the way).

There's so much more that could be said about the album, and maybe sometime I will add to this, but at this point, NEON APOCALYPSE stands as a project that was roughly 5-6 years in the making, introduced me to the world of recording digitally on a computer, helped me understand the songwriting craft, and finally, gave me something to do throughout my entire tenure as a SLU student.

I realize that the songs aren't perfect, but I think regardless of where I go (and I hope it's up), the album itself stands as a testament to my way of thinking at that time, what I thought about music aesthetically, and I hope more than anything it shows off the potential of the songs, regardless of the fact that the whole thing is really no better than a glorified demo.