Raised on a steady diet of classical violin, Kraftwerk, old school break beats, R&B and rock and roll, the Automator is the ultimate musical connoisseur. Growing up in multi-cultural San Francisco, Automator says that mixing it up just comes naturally. A classically trained violinist who can read, write, sample and play music, the Automator started his career as a club DJ in the '80's. By the end of the '90's, he was producing, mixing and remixing tracks for artists diverse as the Beastie Boys, Herbie Hancock, Depeche Mode, Cibo Matto, Primal Scream, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Stereolab, among others. The Automator jump-started his production career in 1996 with the highly acclaimed Dr. Octagon record, Dr. Octagonecologyst (DreamWorks, 1997), a collaboration with Kool Keith and DJ Q-Bert. In 1998, he worked the board on the Bollywood sonic extravaganza, Bombay the Hard Way (Motel). 1999 saw the release of So....How's Your Girl? By Handsome Boy Modeling School, a collaborative effort between Automator and producer Prince Paul. In 2001, Dan got together with cartoon band Gorillaz and reached meteroic success with the single "Clint Eastwood" which featured Blur's damon Albarn, artist Jamie Hewlett, Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori and former Talking Heads Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth. Paul D. Miller is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician working in NYC. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, Wired, Paper Magazine, and a host of other periodicals. He is a co-Publisher along with the legendary African American downtown poet Steve Canon of the magazine "A Gathering of the Tribes" - a periodical dedicated to new works by writers from a multi-cultural context, and he was the first Editor-At-Large of Artbyte: the Magazine of Digital Culture. Currently, he is in the middle of starting another magazine with many of the more progressive aspects of the Artbyte project. The new magazine is 21C - stay tuned for further developments. Miller is most well known under the moniker of his "constructed persona" as "Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid," a character from his upcoming novel "Flow My Blood the Dj Said" that uses a wide variety of digitally created music as a form of post-modern sculpture. Miller has recorded a huge volume of music as "Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid" and has collaborated a wide variety of pre emininet musicians and composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, Killa Priest from Wu-Tang Clan, Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth amongst many others. He also did the music score for the Cannes and Sundance award winning film "Slam" starring critically acclaimed poet Saul Williams. DJ Rectangle first got behind the decks at age 16. By age 17, he had a regular gig at a local club night Distillery East. While living in San Diego, Rectangle began competing for coveted DJ titles, beginning with the “ West Coast N.M.S Championship” held in Tijuana. He eventually competed for the regional DMC Championship, and then the US DMC Championship. After winning the US DMC Championship Rectangle competed for and won The Box National Search for a DJ Champion. The prize was a job with recording rap artist Warren G as his “on tour DJ.” With several world tours under his belt and numerous TV performances including such stops as David Letterman’s The Late Show, The Billboard Awards, and Top of the Pops just to name a few, Rectangle decided to make the move to Los Angeles. In LA Rectangle continued to produce his Break Beat records. At present, Rectangle’s records are the most famous DJ battle tools in the world. Bootleg copies of his mixes are being sold in varying stores across the globe. 1999 saw Rectangle on a personal appearance tour, which covered Europe, Australia, and the US. In addition, he began a new series of break beat records, The Ultimate Ultimate Battle records. By 2001 the label released a box set “ DJ Rectangle’s Ultimate Ultimate Breaks Box” , the first ever-boxed set of battle records. Having produced some of hip-hop’s biggest artists, In 2002 Rectangle is currently working on his own album, as well as a number of Soundtrack contributions, and a female rap project.. SWAMP has been a DJ for more than 15 years and he took the title of USA DMC CHAMPION in 1996, his very first year involved with the contest. He is also known as superstar rocker Beck's DJ as well for other artists such as BT, Better Than Ezra and The Bloodhound Gang. Known for his turntablist antics (including breakbeats, scratching, juggling, and destroying LPs and vinyl without ever losing the beat), Swamp can turn a a simple dj show into something more than words can describe. In concert he's been known to cut himself with shards of shattered vinyl records, scratch a diamond-tipped phonograph needle across his tongue and blow fire, occasionally with calamitous results. "I had to go to the hospital in Phoenix recently with second-degree burns," Swamp said from his publicist's office in New York. "I lit my hand on fire and then blew fire on it and basically became a blow torch. I don't use fire retardant or anything because this is low budget. Dude, I'm just a fire retard." As a solo artist and DJ, Swamp, who recently issued his debut hip-hop disc, Never Is Now, is even more dynamic. Onstage, huddled between a pair of turntables, his unkempt long hair, black polished fingernails and aggressive antics make Swamp look more like a death metal dude than a DJ. And with his wild eyes, perpetual scowl and scraggly beard and moustache, he could easily take home a Severed Head trophy in a Charles Manson lookalike contest. And that's just fine with him." Being sinister is kind of the common thread to everything I do," he said. "There's a lot of different styles, but it's all about the creepy music and the phat beats. I'm probably the hip-hop equivalent to Rob Zombie." Like Zombie's latest, Never Is Now is filled with dramatic rhythms, chilling moods, disturbing sound bites and apocalyptic imagery. The single "Ring of Fire" begins with a creepy organ scale redolent of gothic horror films before latching into some eerie keyboard patches, old-school hip-hop beats and hard rapping. (excerpt taken from MTV Article11.14.2001 by Jon Wiederhorn) A pioneer in the world of hip-hop music and one-half of the world-renowned dj crew the Bombshelter DJs, which also includes fellow Phoenix native Emile, DJ Radar refuses to adhere to artificial musical boundaries, and is constantly searching for fresh and innovative ways to blur the lines between genres. Radar has traveled all across the globe with tours in North America, Europe and Japan. His unprecedented attempts to combine his classical music background with his turntable skills have solidified his place as one of the great innovators of his generation. Never content to simply be a run-of-the-mill DJ, Radar always works to take his art to the next level. Looking for a way to realize his lifelong aspiration of combining his musical background with his desire to write music for turntables, Radar joined forces with jazz piano extraordinaire Raul Yanez. Together they produced "Concerto for Turntable," one of the most experimentally imaginative musical compositions in history. This groundbreaking fusion is the first concerto piece that utilizes a single turntable as an actual musical instrument. With a full symphony orchestra in accompaniment, this landmark piece features the turntable as the lead solo instrument. Unlike a typical turntable performance, this piece does not include any prerecorded music. All of the turntables' melodic and rhythmic notes in the concerto are crafted completely live and the music is written around all of the various scratch techniques that can be produced on a turntable. Radar's main motivation for writing the "Concerto for Turntable," he says, is to "demonstrate the difference between a DJ and turntablist." The first movement of the piece premiered in a performance at Grady Gammage Auditorium with the Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra on March 7, 2001, before a crowd of 3,500 people. This Concerto will be featured on an upcoming world tour..