Joseph Uccello here, age 35, to be 36 in March. Was born in rural California, about 40 miles inland from Santa Cruz. Always felt restless, and always wandered. I've been living up here in the Northwest since late 2004, married for over 3 years to a wonderful woman from China. I was a fairly obsessive traveller for quite a while, propelling myself on these journeys mostly by a loaded touring bicycle (a Waterford, which I still own, though its daily journeys are now quite modest.) I've ridden across the US and extensively through the Alps and the Appenines in Europe. Most of my working life has been as a teacher of English as a Second Language. I've done this job in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East for years. After getting a BA in English Lit at San Francisco State University, I just kind of fell into this job by a natural process. It supported and encouraged the nomadic life, spending 9 months to a year in one place, then grabbing a contract in the next place that looked interesting, and blasting off. By the time I found myself living in China for the second time, I was getting a bit burnt out on this life, and of wandering. It might have been the smog and bleakness of Beijing that was getting to me, but I felt a sudden craving for trees, massive amounts of foliage, and fresh air. My brother was then living in Spokane, and I decided to escape there, then to Portland and now the wonderful Seattle. I think it is one of the most beautiful places I have seen, and experiencing it through the seasons is a something I cherish. As for the Hypnos Forum, I first discovered it while in Bejing that last time. It helped me to discover the world of ambient music that I was just getting to know and love deeply. At that time I also enjoyed and benefited greatly from the reviews written by some of the members of this Forum, and I am thankful for that. It was also excellent to be listening to Hypnos releases that had arrived from the distant land of Portland into the totally different environment of a huge city in northern China. I have fond memories of Ma Ja Le's Seed filling up my little apartment, giving me a great sense of peace and arrival. As for what I am doing now, I seem to have fallen deeply in with doing art and design. I had been drawing steadily during the wandering years, when I could get together a table and pens, but eventually the urge to create art finally took over completely, urged on by various extraordinary occurences and realizations. I decided to move to the Northwest for a complete change, and have found a different kind of joy here, one of seeing the seasons come and go, of getting in to a sedate life rhythm that will allow me to focus on my art. I am constantly doing art and designing graphics, studying ancient art and gaining inspiration from that. I recently was honored by the use of my art on two separate releases of Alio Die, which is something I could not have imagined when I was sitting in distant lands, creating art to the soundtrack of his music. This is a great thing for me personally, and it has inspired me to get deeper into design for music. To this end I am working on various projects for inspiring musicians, and am trying to start up a label with a first release, for which the art is completely designed. The music is by my brother, who is an excellent standup bass player, and becoming a fascinating creator of jazz propelled textural constructions. I have lately begun freaking out in a good way about typography and letterpress printing, and have begun a program in the Publishing Arts, in order to bring my fascination with ink on paper to fuller fruition, and which may even allow me employment other than teaching English, which I am looking forward to. Not that I don't like teaching English, just got a bit burnt out on it. I do eventually hope to do it again, and perhaps even go back out into the world, but who knows...
And I am a huge fan of many espressos, which may explain the rambling nature of this post so late at night. But I am also very much a fan of mightily hopped up Northwest Beer, another of the things (besides espresso and dark ambient music) at which the northwest excels...
Back to the drawing table...