Today we’d like to introduce you to Timothy Gmeiner.
Hi Timothy, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I am foundationally a hip-hop artist (producer and emcee) originally from Dayton, Ohio. I was introduced to hip-hop via Public Enemy and Ice Cube at 8 years old. By 10 years old, I was looping instrumentals via pause tapes and rapping over them with a pair of broken headphones plugged into a mic jack. I spent a large majority of my high school afternoons writing, producing and recording albums in my bedroom that few will hear, if only because my voice didn’t actually drop until the 11th grade.
By 2005, I independently released my first solo album, “Illumination” as an active participant of the Cincinnati, Ohio hip-hop scene. My friends and I began actively touring and continued to put out records consistently. By 2007, I gained international attention in my niche underground hip-hop market, both for my solo album “The World is Ours” and a mashup album re-imagining the music of Portishead to the vocals of emcee Joe Budden. – a project I produced and released over the course of a weekend on a diet of boxed macaroni and cheese that somehow went viral 3 days later, an arc I’m still completely puzzled by.
By the 2010’s, I’d landed in Columbus, Ohio where my team and I built a formal label, Definition Music, and management company, VoiceOfRzn. This allowed me to grow as a producer and performer toward working with live musicians, particularly from our region’s coveted Ohio Funk community (Ohio Players, SUN, Heatwave, etc.)
In 2014, my family and I moved to San Diego, CA. By sheer grace of God (and an upstart called The Chrch), I was presented with the opportunity to help a good friend, Bernie Fishman, launch his record shop, Beat Box Records, in Barrio Logan (still there today!). Given our family’s precarious financial condition, I threaded together as many congruent hustles as I could to help keep rent paid. One of which was my small business, SoundRzn Design, which provided music production, mixing and graphic design services for a host of clients in San Diego and beyond. All the while, I continued to release albums, perform and produce bodies of work for other incredible artists.
As a former college drop-out, I was quite bitter on higher education. However, in 2017, my wife convinced me to join her on returning back to school. I entered the Commercial Music program at San Diego City College and surprisingly fell in love with the program, and the idea of higher education – particularly at the community college level. It was in this program where I collaborated with my department chair, Bob Kostlan, to develop a series of workshops on music entrepreneurship based on my prior and ongoing experiences as an independent artist and small business owner. These workshops ultimately developed into a curriculum that I currently teach in the very same program I graduated from some years back.
In 2020, I transferred to UC-San Diego’s ICAM-Music program and soon after was accepted into a position at Qualcomm Institute’s Audio Spatialization Lab on campus. Inspired by my lifelong experience with synesthesia (sight-and-sound sensory-overlap), I pursued how my artistic practice might converge with technology in more meaningful ways and began studying and creating toward topics in virtual reality, audiovisual relationships in live performance, sound spatialization, and other digital signal processing concepts. In 2022, I extended these interests in UC-San Diego’s Computer Music graduate program, narrowing my focus to spatialized and interactive compositions in virtual reality, live spatial audiovisual performances, and large-scale real-time reactive installations.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Not at all. My family and I have barely hung on during our time in San Diego. We landed here in a Motel 6 and prayed/worked our way through a series of failures and victories. Almost every accomplishment achieved has in some way felt a bit accidental. My most challenging series of struggles spanned between 2017-2020: my mom’s health was deteriorating rapidly back in Dayton, Ohio and we were struggling to keep bills paid in San Diego, California. That entire period was filled with traumas that I’m still unpacking nearly a decade later, but it was also filled with so many inflection points that have afforded me the opportunities I find myself surrounded by now. The way the obstacles and victories have threaded together is nothing short of poetic, and on my better days, hilarious in some ways.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m currently most excited about building ambitious narrative-driven and music-centered immersive projects and performances. In 2021, my good friend and visual collaborator Ben Guerrette and I formed the group With Flying Colors and began performing live audiovisual electronic/hip-hop surrounded by a huge circle of lights that reacted to musical elements of our performance and Ben’s improvisations. We’ve since transformed this into found-space performances, most recently returning back to Beat Box Records and turning it into a Boiler Room style event.
In 2023, My collaborator, Eito Murakami and I presented a virtual reality composition titled “Pigments of Imagination” as part of the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS Initiative. The VR piece (and accompanying paper) was selected for the VRST Conference in New Zealand later that year, where we won an award for best VR demo, had our paper published, and then I promptly broke both my elbows tripping (with both feet) on the cobble-stone road outside of the conference’s convention center.
Earlier this year, I worked with Ben and another friend (and incredible visual collaborator) from UC-San Diego, Mingyong Cheng, to conceptualize “Dreams Dyed Blue” an immersive electroacoustic hip-hop performance at UCSD’s Experimental Theater. This performance included a fantastic lineup of musicians from our program: David Aguila, Natalia Merlano-Gomez and Anita Chandavarkar, and allowed me to reimagine how hip-hop can look, sound and feel when presented across 32 channels of spatial audio and real-time visual reactivity. I have a big interest in visual music history, and would love to take this concert into planetariums like those of the expanded arts scene of the 1950s/60s.
My research reinforces these creative endeavors: my current areas of focus involve developing music-centered artistic works and nonlinear compositional techniques in VR, technical application of spatial and audiovisual mapping through sinusoidal analysis and reconstruction, and the cultural/social/technical/socio-political implications of converging hip-hop production and performance in these more technologically-centered immersive environments.
Lastly, I’m surprised at how much I genuinely enjoy teaching. I’ve been teaching my music entrepreneurship course at City College for two years now alongside a host of music production classes, and was recently afforded the opportunity to teach the hip-hop course at UC-San Diego this past winter and spring, which was the honor of a lifetime.
Ultimately, I’m really digging the research/create/educate lifecycle and am looking to ride this thing out as long as the universe sees fit.
Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
Every memory I have with my mom and dad.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.illpoetic.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/illpoetic513
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-gmeiner-638b442a/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/illpoetic
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ill-poetic
- Other: https://www.soundrzn.com/
Image Credits
Main pic – Robert Sanchez
Additional pics (in order)
Qualcomm Institute
Qualcomm Institute
Ben Guerrette
Cameron Keezer-Wulff
Timothy Gmeiner
Louis Rideout
Ben Guerrette
Shahidah Asadi
