The Megadrives began in 2006 after Joe “Sheephead” Clark and Ryan “K-Rai” Stinnett met, quickly becoming friends over a mutual love for anime, techno, and all things cyber. They soon learned that each had just started using the same music tracking software Renoise. As the story would have it Joe says to Ryan “I’ve got a DJ mixer, so why don’t we plug in an see what happens?”.
K-Rai’s background in music was first with playing the violin while in kindergarten, quickly dropping it only to return with playing the guitar in middle school, eventually dropping that and returned to music once more in high school delving into electronic music production headfirst using the tracking software Impulse Tracker. He hasn’t stopped producing and performing live since. Renoise was the natural progression, picking up where the older DOS based program had left off. Joe had never tracked music before, but unlike Ryan he’d been DJing vinyl for several years and never really stopped playing traditional instruments such as guitar, bass, and piano, which he picked up during the school years. Both had been in various bands through the passing of time but The Megadrives is quite unlike anything they had ever done before.
Combining their laptops, mixers, MIDI keyboards, effects, and using turntablist techniques, they quickly went on to performing out live with intense energy. They consistently garner raving responses from audiences wherever they go. Unique in a scene dominated by the DJ, all tracks are self-produced, mixed live, and tweaked through the software. The Megadrives prefer not to limit themselves to only one particular genre within electronic music but do best while exploring any styles that happen to excite them, ranging from (and not limited to): Acid, Breaks, Down Tempo, Drum & Bass, Dub, Glitch, House, IDM, Psychedelia, Trance, and Trip Hop. All of which is brought together with an ever changing, fluid, non-stop mix.
The team has also been known to include live video mixing, most notably and often by Justin “Chroma” Miller. Justin started doing the band’s VJing soon after the band’s inception and has provided much live, customized & self-produced, psychedelic visual projections. He soon caught the music bug himself though and now focuses on his own band doing experimental music relegating VJ duties to others more often than not. The footage produced through live jamming always remains the most fitting and can still be seen during special events.
Inspired by other Electronica duo peers, such as: The Crystal Method (who The Megadrives opened for on TCM’s Divided By Night tour in 2009), The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, and Orbital; The Megadrives continue to push the envelope in their pursuit of the ultimate electronic sound. Expressing all their internal human emotions via external computer output and directly into your eardrums.
