It started with a pre-adolescent fascination with tape recorders. A seven-year-old Mark, armed with a patch cable, his portable tape recorder, and his father's cassette deck, had an epiphany: The equipment could be connected together to copy, or more importantly, edit audio. The most basic information to a recording engineer? Definitely. But to a seven-year-old? An open door leading to a world of opportunity.

Mark grew up in Johnson City, New York, in a quiet neighborhood where there weren't many kids his age. An only child with a well-meaning but overprotective mom, Mark had to find imaginative ways to enteratain himself. Fascinated by technology, Mark soon became immersed in the world of computers. "People labeled me as a nerd," he says, "but that word meant a completely different thing fifteen years ago. Now nerds are considered 'cool' because some trendsetter became obsessed with Death Cab for Cutie. Today's nerds are yesterday's preps. So I guess that makes me the real emo kid. Ugh."

In high school Mark and friends Chris Coleman, Jamie Carey, and Phil McGovern would record music, bouncing from one cassette deck to another in the absence of a 4-track. In 1993, the day of his senior prom (he didn't go, because he was a nerd), he bought a 4-track and started recording even more. By 1995 Mark was bitten by the spacemusic bug and recorded his first full-length solo album, Mother of Invention. Unimpressed by the quality of even his 4-track, Mark bounced the tracks to VHS tape, an old trick for recording on the cheap that produces professional results. In 1998 the transition to computer-based recording was complete; his 1998 album Felix Culpa was mixed and mastered entirely on a 400MHz personal computer in his bedroom. 2004's Don't Wait was fully digital from start-to-finish, without the involvement of a recording studio or ProTools software. Every second was painstakingly perfected using little more than a notebook computer and the instruments.

While not writing and recording his own music, Mark has provided media services to like-minded people. He is the producer of Phil McGovern's 2001 release Exit 71 (demo); the 2005 debut album from world jazz musicians Chance Meeting, Impressions; the 2006 full-length self-titled debut of Binghamton metal act Silent Aftermath; and has assisted in the production of Smothered in Argyle's The Cruel and Casual, due in July 2007. Many of those projects involved much more than what an industry producer would do; in most cases Mark designed the liner and disc artwork and in some cases, duplicated discs by hand.

His music has been heard on terrestrial and internet radio, and was used at an event attended by former First Lady Hillary Clinton. His visual designs have been seen by millions on websites for WHRW-FM, Down to Earth Whole Foods, EvolutionRadio, Smothered in Argyle, and WHRWalumni.org. During his time at WHRW, he was producer of The Mad Trivia Party, one of the longest-running call-in shows in history, and produced three best-of albums for the show. In 2005, he even ventured into film, co-producing a short film entitled "Vong," a pastiche of the classic film-student shorts about the "tragedy of the human condition."

Mark's solo music is a broad soundscape of human tragedy and triumph. One listener has described it as "haunting," another as "the soundtrack for the beauty and tragedy of the soul's depths." One music website called it "the best of 2004." It defies categorization, pulling as equally from metal as it does from ambient genres. To make comparisons - Steve Roach, Windy & Carl, Sigur Rós - does not take into account that it is also completely new, without precedent. Mark's music brings a much-needed Western organic quality to spacemusic that is rarely if ever explored. While the industry searches for "the next Hendrix," "the next Nirvana," or "the next Beatles," Mark isn't being the next anybody. He is doing something the industry doesn't seem to understand anymore: Something new.

Mark's current project is a more accessible album, The Solution is the Problem, which will feature more traditional rock instrumentation and arrangements, but will have more than its share of unique moments, including a five-minute noisescape produced with the assistance of legendary "phone phreaks" Evan Doorbell and Mark Bernay. Comparisons to The Devin Townsend Band's Synchestra have already been made, but Mark describes it with a smile as "what would happen if Devin Townsend, Björk, and Warren Zevon did a record, and they tried to make it weird."