WHO IS SID ZERO?

Sid Zero is an independent industrial/EDM producer based out of St Louis, best known for mixing hard-hitting industrial dance beats that borrow from every genre of electronic music with a punk rock attitude and a touch of psychedelic flair.

After a decade and a half long hiatus, he’s returned to offend the sensibilities of a new generation of music fans that claim good taste, and remind the world, once again, that the rules of art are meant to be broken. His unique brand of sonic terrorism has transgressed the boundaries of genre since the end of the millennium, and will continue to defy all expectations as it adapts and evolves it’s way into the future.

Sid is currently in the middle of reworking and rereleasing his first six albums. The first three of those albums, Above God and Purgatory I+II, collectively known as The Original Trilogy, and the fourth album, Fifth Dimension, are available now exclusively on SoundCloud.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY MUSIC CAREER

: iteration alpha :

August, 1996 – I recorded my first song, called “Organism”. It was about as good as one would expect a fifteen year-old to make using an old boom box with two tape decks, a guitar, an amp, some FX pedals, and a couple of old toy keyboards I’d been playing with for as long as I can remember.

Fun fact: It’s the only song I’ve ever recorded to feature my own voice in it, and no one will ever hear it because I lost the tapes a long time ago.

: iteration beta :

June, 1999 – Shortly after graduating high school, I got my hands on my first DAW (an early version of the ACID software). Over the summer, I recorded a dozen tracks, inspired primarily by 90s electronica and industrial rock remix albums, using the sample packs I got with ACID and a handful of freeware softsynths and pattern sequencers I found online.

September, 1999 – I started posting those tracks under the name “Above God” on mp3.com as my first demo album, “Symphony of Self Destruction”.

February, 2000 – I followed that up with a second demo album, a 4-track “concept album” EP called “Invasion of the Killer Robots from Mars”. I also had a third demo album I was workshopping at the time as well, but dropped it when I decided to change direction.

: iteration 1.x :

September, 2000 – I released my first “official” album, “Negative Zero”. It mostly consisted of tracks from my demo albums that I had reworked, a couple of previously unfinished songs, plus a brand new one, titled “Circle of Scars”, that I recorded by adding a pirate copy of an old version of Fruity Loops (now FL Studio) to my workflow. It was the most popular song I ever recorded, hitting as high as #37 on the electronic music charts on mp3.com at one point.

Fun Fact: Though I’m calling it “iteration 1.x” now, I had originally labelled the album as “version 1.0” because I knew, even back then, that I was going to want to hit the reset button on it several times in the future.

January, 2001 – I released the first version of my second album, “Purgatory: Outtakes and Remixes vol. 1”. It featured a brand new title track, two tracks that didn’t make it onto Negative Zero, and five remixes I did of some of my favorite songs. Over the next year and a half or so, I started posting new remixes and finished a few more unfinished tracks, planning for a second and possibly third outtake and remix album, as well as a maxi-single for Circle of Scars. But once again, I decided to change direction.

: iteration 2.x :

August, 2002 – My first big reboot. I rereleased Negative Zero, having made a few minor changes across a handful of tracks. I also released an “official” second album, “Oblivion” and a new version of Purgatory, having added most of the “new” tracks I produced since then, split them between remixes and original tracks, and put the original ones on Oblivion and the remixes on Purgatory (except for the title track of the latter, which was the only non-remix on it), and making that my third “official” album.

April, 2003 – I built my first website and announced that I was working on a new album. The website was just some ugly thing I slapped together on a free webhost, and really only because I had heard rumors mp3.com wasn’t going to be around much longer (it was gone by the end of the year).

May, 2004 – I released my fourth album, “5th Dimension” exclusively for download on my website. With mp3.com gone, and no other way to promote my music, I pretty much lost my entire audience outside of a small handful of people I knew personally. Times were hard for independent musicians before social media took over the world.

Fun Fact: While I still released the album under the name “Above God”, I had been calling myself Sid Zero for about a year by this point. Also, this is the first album not to use any sample loops from the packs I got with ACID. From this point forward, all my music would be made using FL Studio.

: iteration 3.x :

August, 2005 – I officially changed the name I was producing music under to “Sid Zero” and launched the first version of sidzero.com. I also announced a fifth album, originally called “Satellite”, to be due out the following February, and posted some of my favorite and most popular tracks from the first four on some music hosting site that failed to become SoundCloud to offer streams from my own site.

February, 2006 – I missed the deadline I gave myself and announced that Satellite would be delayed. I also announced that I was remastering my first four albums, creating new artwork for them, and rereleasing them under the new Sid Zero name. Because giving yourself more work when you’re already behind is always a good idea.

: hiatus :

July, 2007 – Due to circumstances in my personal life beyond my control, I had to put my music career on indefinite hiatus. I expected it to only last a few months, maybe a year at most. I’ve never been more wrong in my life.

There were still a handful of tracks across all five albums I wished I could do more with, but I finished them all up as best as I could with what little time I had, then packed them into a zip file (arxhive.zip) and put it on the site where anyone could download it for free. I doubt anyone ever did, though. It also had about two dozen additional tracks, some from a more experimental sixth album I had been working on, others cut from previous albums, and a new “theme song” for the collection titled “This Music…” that I created as a joke, but was surprisingly popular.

August, 2009 – I announced I was shutting down the servers on my site at the end of the month. I was still squatting on the domain, hoping to start again someday, but sidzero.com was done for the time being.

May, 2015 – At the request of a friend of mine, I uploaded “This Music…” and a few of my favorite tracks from Satellite to the not-SoundCloud site. I had been referring to the tracks on that site as my unofficial “Greatest Hits Album” for a few years by this point. I never officially released it until my reboot with iteration 4.x, but this is essentially when it was first released.

: iteration 4.x :

January, 2022 – After fifteen years and maybe a dozen half-assed attempts to reboot my music career, I decided it was either now or never… and it was now. My music deserved a chance to be heard. I had six albums worth of music, and I began reworking it from the first. It was a good chance to try and turn them into what they always should have been.

August, 2022 – I had made significant progress reworking my first album, far more than any of my previous attempts at rebooting, and was confident I was going to be able to stick to my plan and finish what I started. So I announced my return and started uploading what I had done.

December, 2022 – Just before New Year’s, and right on schedule, I finished the last track on the new version of my first album, Above God (with a title track renamed after my original moniker), and released it on SoundCloud.

March, 2023 – While procrastinating on my second and third albums, which I expected to be finished by the end of the year, I built and launched the new sidzero.com. I’m not exactly the world’s greatest web designer, but it’s functional, and I’m getting it to “good enough” as I go.

September, 2023 – I finished reworking my second and third albums, Purgatory I + II, a couple months ahead of schedule, so I uploaded and released the both of them to SoundCloud. I also released the combined first three albums as a collection titled “The Original Trilogy”.

January, 2024 – I started on my plan of releasing my fourth and fifth albums, 5th Dimension and Inner Space, one song at a time, and posting each track to my SoundCloud every Friday at noon.

April, 2024 – After 17 weeks of posting new tracks every Friday, the final track from Fifth Dimension went live, and I released the latest iteration of the album itself. After taking a week off, I started posting new tracks from Inner Space on the first week of May.

INTO THE FUTURE

Over the next year or so, I plan to finish reworking my old music. I expect to have albums 4, 5, and 6 all done by the end of 2024. After that, I’ll be working on some brand new stuff based on ideas I’ve been kicking around since before I even went on hiatus.

Expect to see my first album of all-new material sometime in 2025. It’s gonna be awesome.