Planewalker

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Planewalker (a.k.a. Epsylon, Epsilon Deva) is a Canadian American electronic music producer, most known for live twilight psytrance sets in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.A. Inspired by the spiritualism of India in his several visits to the Himalayas, his style blends soaring melodies with acoustic instruments and intense synthetic sound design elements. He is also an accomplished promoter and electronic music teacher, having promoted many electronic music events under the Metakinetics banner, including the Contact Festival in 2007. His career has been closely associated with Spun Academy and Apollo's Lute. He also produces the Portland-based chillout artist Mister Chill'R.

Biography

Planewalker first performed as a DJ in Taos, New Mexico, USA under the name "Epsilon Deva" in 1999. A Berklee College of Music alumni, he released his first album Clear & Present Truth in 2001, followed by 5HK in 2002. He organized many events in northern New Mexico under the [Metakinetics banner in the mid-2000s and was one of the headliners for the 2nd Annual New Mexico Electronic Music Festival.

2004 marked an important year for Planewalker as his first track Delta Waves was sold to the record label Pure Energy Records and pressed to 12" vinyl. He soon moved from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Los Angeles where he was first exposed to a high activity psytrance scene at Green Sector parties. It was here that he met up with producers Adam Young and Sunbyte (a.k.a. Matthias), resulting in a number of collaborations. He began teaching electronic music production at the ICON Collective in downtown Los Angeles, resuming the music synthesis program started by Cameron of Nagual Sound Experiment.

In 2006, he moved to Portland, Oregon where he began working with Apollo's Lute and other promoters in the area and was soon hired to design the music production program for Spun Academy. In the fall of 2006 he started the monthly psytrance night Sacred Space with DJ Semblance in downtown Portland, which ran for 10 months and led up to the Contact Festival. Metakinetics was retired as an event organization company in May 2008 with its last event Goa Awaya.

In 2008, Planewalker relocated to Taos, New Mexico where he worked on a number of incomplete albums before founding the record label Lucid Dream Records. The first release of the label was the popular underground psytrance hit Backwards In Time.

In 2009, Planewalker left North America for his first extended visit to Europe, landing in Altea on the Costa Blanca of Spain.

Equipment

Planewalker uses several Apple computers and Logic Studio to produce his music. Although he has used many hardware synthesizers such as the Access Virus, Korg Z1 and Alesis Micron for sound design, he moved away from using hardware in 2009 to streamline his setup. He now prefers to work with Logic's instruments, Native Instruments, and FabFilter plugins for production. He performs with Ableton Live.