Who is?
Systemchick (aka Emily) started playing in bands as a teenager in Chicago in the 90's. House and industrial were everywhere. She began playing lead guitar with several industrial bands at their studios. Already being very interesting in distortion, every studio she played at there was always different recording equipment and effects. At one point, she saw a floppy disk being put into a keyboard and thought "this was very new and confusing, I was like what is that about".
She started to learn more about multi-track recording and eventually found her way to software. It started out simply so she could have a more interesting metronome. "After I discovered you could take a bass drum and play it at 200 beats per minute in different musical notes, and throw piano rolls on cymbals and the limitlessness of it all just overwhelmed me in a very good way." Soon after she would spend so much time programming beats that she got interested in playing drums as well.
In 2000 she relocated to the San Francisco bay area and very soon after began playing guitar with the death metal noise band Pandora's Dream. After playing shows and gigging throughout SF and the East Bay, the girls amicably parted ways one year later.
Wanting to get all kinds of musical experience, and with an enormous love for free jazz (Sun Ra, Ornette, Mingus, Pharaoh Sanders) Emily began playing drums in a big band jazz band. "Initially I though this many people and all these instruments coming together would be great, but really I felt very rigid and almost robotic doing these standards. No room to deviate too much from the sheet music" Learning about electronics and sound engineering, and sound related physics at night the first tracks of Forces against Nature were recorded in 2003 while in the jazz band - almost as a reaction to it.
'Forces Against Nature' was recorded between 2003 and 2007. The remastering in 2007 took her 6 months, due to all her equipment changes, and trying to learn to mix analog and digital sources together on her own. Virtually no compression was used.
In 2007 after the release of her CD on Kunaki, Systemchick wrote her own biography of herself in the 3rd person. She felt this was better than throwing a fake first and last name at the bottom trying to pretend it was press like everybody else. "I feel it's more legit this way", she says.
Thanks for your interest and for going past the sounds being spoon fed to you from mass media :)