Hi, I’m Daniel, I create music under the name A Path Untold. I've founded this site and educational platform to strive toward a unique offering of services, insight and knowledge for electronic music folk of all persuasions. This is a platform geared toward not just the technicals of composition and production - but also what drives those processes: the mental, emotional and philosophical aspects that inform the creative mindset behind the music, from my perspective, and perhaps some guests from time to time.
For the last 22 years, I’ve dedicated my life and full creative energy to this artform, and have had countless incredible adventures, profound discoveries and exhilirating experiences that've been shaped by it. Throughout my own evolution as an artist, including trials and tribulations, struggles and triumphs, I've felt compelled to share what I’ve discovered, and continue to discover along the way.
I truly believe that electronic music, as an artform, is a limitless sonic playground where the realms of sound and imagination converge and anything is possible - if you can dream it up and bring it into form. Throughout it's constantly evolving and mutating history, it has spawned countless genres, cultures and styles that have touched upon many facets of human life and expression - and we’ve still really only begun to scratch the surface. The capacity it provides for storytelling, personal and collective expression, emotional transmutation, consciousness exploration and self-therapy is truly transcendent, and out of all the artforms that are possible, its certainly one of the most exciting and powerfully relevant of our age. The ability to create any sound one can imagine, tap into a sense of limitlessness, and communicate potent, human emotional experiences is unto itself a magical feat. I perpetually look forward to hearing the sounds and expressions of the ever-renewing wave of creators who utilize this medium to its fullest potential.
These are some of the highest purposes that music can provide to us. Music informs the way we perceive the world around us, the way we react to it, and contribute to it. If you want to know what a culture is about, listen to it's music: it’s a dialogue and exploration of individual and collective consciousness and it's values, concepts and emotions. But, perhaps most importantly, music creation is also just incredibly FUN, and provides some very much-needed escapism from every day life.
I've created this site to perpetuate ideas that I find to be insipiring and relevant, do my best to contribute to the conversation around the artform, and assist in the creative success of developing artists by helping them translate their imaginations into a tangible reality. I’ve done my best to infuse everything on this site with my own hard-won, intuitive and experiential knowledge that I've found to be useful in my own path. I truly hope you find some value while you're here.
For the last 22 years, I’ve been living and breathing electronic music as a composer, producer and DJ. It’s been a consistently guiding force that's shaped the direction of my life in profound ways, providing an ongoing foundation of purpose, inspiration and self-discovery. All aspects of electronic music - from discovery, creation, immersion in rave culture and it's social stratosphere, dramatically helped me transmute challenging life experiences into positive outcomes during developmental years. It's not an overstatement to say it helped save my life in very tangible ways.
I came of age in the 90's, in what was an isolated and economically disadvantaged region of the Appalachian mountains (East Coast U.S.), where depression, addiction, suicide and incarceration were extremely prominent outcomes for many of my peers. I discovered hiphop, grunge, metal, and began playing metal guitar at the age of 13, which gradually became an obsession. Where I lived was quite isolated and culturally removed, and it wasn't feasible to start a band or collaborate with other people with the same interests. I started discovering basic recording and music production methods (4-track recorders), which became a way to express my ideas without having to rely on anyone. I began recording and creating my own metal and industrial projects, and finding creative autonomy was empowering.
My late teen and early adult years were rather unorthodox and full of challenges. At age 17, I suffered a serious car accident that left me paralyzed from the waist down and it took me over a year to regain the ability to walk. After that, I lived a transient lifestyle for some years and faced numerous serious legal issues due to psychedelic possession-related offenses in the very narrow-minded rural community I lived in. I struggled with intense depression and anxiety issues consistently, went through quite a few near-death experiences (including a series of mini-strokes), and lost many friends due to overdose, violence, terminal illness and other untimely causes. Suffice to say, it was one of the toughest parts of my life.
What got me through all this was that I'd taught myself to compose and produce music throughout those times (mostly without the internet, RTFM), trying out every genre I could get my hands on to experiment and express my experiences and perspectives. I then became a parent unexpectedly at age 24. Specifically because of music, eventually I managed to leave the area/environment and find a more positive and fruitful path for myself and my family. Discovering the rave scene in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. offered a supportive community, helped me overcome crippling social anxiety and provided a gateway to the world. Creating and performing music provided purpose, freedom, community and the motivation to keep pushing forward in empowering ways.
In 2004 I co-founded the IDM/Downtempo duo Aligning Minds with my best friend, which we developed and pursued until 2015. Through innumerable mind-expanding and inspiring creative experiences, we co-created a substantial body of work, which we shared with the world through releases, tours and countless festivals. I also explored an obsession with drum n’ bass and several side projects. We held down recurring residencies in D.C. (88DC crew) between 2006-2011 that were hugely developmental for us, including participating mixed-media events XinDC and Loda, where we cut our teeth on stage sometimes several times a month, hosting and improvising with hundreds of ground-breaking artists from all across the board, ranging from artists such as Daedelus, Nosaj Thing, Lorn, Jimmy Edgar, Robert Manos, Ed:it, Machinedrum, Eskmo, Kilowatts, John Tejada, Krts, to name but a few. It was an incredibly inspiring time and series of events, and absolutely one of my favourite eras of my life.
In 2015, I formed A Path Untold - a solo project that would allow me to follow my evolving creative instincts and vision. Doing a complete career-reboot was not an easy process, but I felt it to be the only authentic way forward. Over the years, I’ve crafted what I feel to be a distinctly unique style and have stuck to my authentic vision at all costs, in an effort to create personal, emotionally impactful music that has served as an ongoing practice and way of life. I’ve released music on an eclectic spectrum of notable labels over the years, from Aleph Zero/Beats & Pieces to Gravitas, Timewheel, Aquatic Collective, Valence and most recently, psychedelic art collective The Chambers Project.
Becoming increasingly interested in the deeper aspects of the creative process, I began teaching composition and production in an inner-city Baltimore school, group retreats, and private students, and ultimately discovering the enriching practice of creativity coaching in 2015. It became my mission to better understand and learn how to implement tools for navigating creative blocks that I'd personally encountered and learned to overcome (usually the hard way) - like procrastination, self-doubt, perfectionism, comparison, burnout, resistance, “writers block”, and many more. This led to a deepening fascination with cultivating optimal creative mindset, workflow, productivity, artist brand development, telling sonic stories effectively, and sharing it all with the world.
I’m avidly, obsessively interested in the rapidly-evolving state music technology and am constantly seeking new innovative ways of creating, staying in the flow, utilizing new techniques and tools and exploring the scope of what's possible. Throughout it all, and true to the foundation that I come from, my emphasis is on following my imagination where it leads me and sticking to my guns - regardless of hype or coming-and-going trends. As an artist, my primary concern is making the most personally relevant, unique and transportive music I can, and as an educator, I thrive on helping others do the same. If I were to distill my creative philosophy down a bit, it would read something like this:
BE ADVENTUROUS. GET WILD. TAKE RISKS. DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT. REVEL IN YOUR UNIQUENESS. BE AN INDEPENDENT THINKER. BE HONEST. CREATE FROM THE HEART. INFUSE SOME DANGER INTO YOUR ART. REFLECT WHAT YOU FEEL. SAMPLE YOUR LIFE.
If you'd like to know more about what I'm up to as an artist, you can check out my music, interviews, press and more on my artist website.