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Here's a video I shot in 1 day for my song "The Children".

This is a video using old student film footage I shot while in school. The music is from my "Electronic Trash" album:

By Ryan Snyder from YES! Weekly in Greensboro, NC.

There’s a lot of truth to be found in the old axiom “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Just ask Greensboro electronic musician and current drummer for Invisible (www.myspace.com/invisiblerocks) Bart Trotman why he might be interested in something like an old Commodore 64 trivia database tape. Trotman, who performs under the moniker Workday/Schoolnight (www.myspace.com/workdayschoolnight), has become a thrift-store regular, constantly in search of new (consequently, old) sources of sound that create the framework for much of his material. He’ll tell you with little provocation that he’ll eagerly snatch up a sweet piece of discarded electronics left on a curb if he can fit it into his scheme.

Walk into his live show and it might look only a few steam-powered bicycles short of a miniature version of the Museum of Retro Technology. With a setup that includes three throwaway ’80s consumer keyboards, a tape player/TV/alarm clock combo and an ancient Hammond drum machine only a part of his collection, Trotman has distinguished himself as one of the most imaginative artists in the area. “This is stuff that I’ve been accumulating for years,” he said. “As opposed to having one fancy keyboard that does a thousand things, I have a lot of different ones that are limited. But since I have a specific variety, I think it gives me a unique sound.”

What’s his favorite find? Undoubtedly, he says, are answering machine tapes. “They're one-of-a-kind sounds that only exist on that tape,” Trotman said. “I always try to play some of those at shows.”

Unlike some of his dance-oriented distant cousins, Trotman isn’t looking to pack club floors and festival tents with sweaty, glowstick-laden rave children. Instead, he creates dystopian soundscapes by imbuing his satirically witty choice of samplings with his own rather bleak societal point of views, especially regarding contemporary medical practices and the Food and Drug Administration.

Though he has been working on his solo material for around four years and produced four albums, Electronic Trash being the latest, Trotman only recently started performing live. His first live performance came in October 2008 and since then, has only played publicly a handful of times. Admittedly not the most adept pianist, his performances possess their own brand of avant-garde panache.

“It’s very punk rock in the sense that I’m a drummer first and not a keyboard player,” he stated. “My keyboard playing is very limited, but I find that working with limitations is actually a really good thing.”

That sort of honest transparency is evident in each of his performances, as Trotman prides himself on allowing the audience to see just how every sound is made. He engages onlookers not just aurally, but physically. While some artists utilize laptops to create a full, robust sound, they might just be playing Tetris or checking e-mail for all the audience knows.

Many use complicated lighting schemes to fill the empty space created by the lack of movement, but that’s not the case with Workday/Schoolnight. His samples are the tapes he collects and not computer files, so the audience actually sees the origin of the sound.

“I’m putting the tape in and hitting play while creating a drum beat with my hands, as opposed to just clicking and having a full drum beat appear out of nowhere,” he added. Workday/Schoolnight performs at the Green Bean on Friday and at the Maya Gallery on Feb. 20.