Inside the Cell

Written by Trevor Wood

     Celldweller, a.k.a. Klayton is a multi-instrumentalist artist, songwriter, producer, programmer, audio engineer, and remixer. His music is usually made 100% by himself. He composes, creates, plays, records, mixes, and masters all of his own songs. From stripped down electronic hard rock songs to extremely progressive atmospheric songs and energetic intense score driven songs and all the fusion genres you could think of.

     Klayton started his music career in the 80’s, at which time he was known as Scott Albert. He took one semester of Music Theory in high school, but dropped out saying “all they wanted to tell [him] is what [he] could and couldn’t do according to the laws of music and [he] couldn’t have cared less." The first instrument he had acquired and played was a drum set. In the late 80’s, he was in a thrash metal project, Immortal. They put a demo cassette out, but weren’t very successful. After Immortal disbanded, he was in an industrial metal band called Circle Of Dust. Circle Of Dust were signed to R.E.X. records, toured around and released three albums. There were a number of side projects he was in around the time off and on too including, Brainchild, and a band called Argyle Park which received heavy criticism. During this time, there were a lot of problems with terrible record deals and other things. Eventually he decided to end Circle Of Dust and start something new. During that time, he had formed a band (Angeldust) with illusionist, Criss Angel. After parting ways with Criss in 1999, he finally began to start something that would later be wildly successful: Celldweller.

Celldweller’s sound was not only influenced by a history of metal music, but also a huge influence from European drum n’ bass music. Starting to combine different genres and bend the laws of music theory he had felt as unimportant in high school, he discovered new sounds and ways to make music. A few genres became several and several became infinite. He was collaborating with Grant Mohrman at the time for recording and mastering his songs. Klayton independently released the flawless, progressive, self titled concept album, Celldweller in 2003. The album takes you through an implied storyline along a cycle of multiple genres fusing with others of hard rock, heavy metal, techno, and a lot of other electronic genres that don’t really have a name and can’t be defined as anything other than Celldweller.

In 2006, Klayton founded FiXT, his own record label. However, it is not only a record label, but also a huge online retailer, film/TV/Video game licencor, YouTube monetization, and recently book publisher. From now on Celldweller music will be released through FiXT along with other artists such as SeamlessR, LVL, Voicians, Ryle, Blue Stahli, and many more. Around the time when FiXT was starting out, Klayton took Bret Autrey under his wing and helped him become successful as the one person electronic rock outfit, Blue Stahli. Recently, Klayton has also been working on his clothing line, Outland.

Skip ahead to 2008, Celldweller’s next full album, a bit of a different take. This album, Soundtrack For The Voices In My Head Vol. 1, was a more symphonic driven collection of score music filled with crazy electronic flares mixed in. In the insert of volume one, Klayton says that he has written and archives hundreds of tracks over the years. He had been planning to collect enough tracks of a similar nature to put them into another cohesive album.

“In recent months, I felt like I reached a point where I had accumulated a good selection of tracks that were naturally geared to be more instrumental/score-based and would fit well in the film/tv/video game world.”

In the second volume, released in 2012, he writes in the booklet,

“My mind is perpetually full of visual: Self-created fantasy worlds filled with monsters, robots, aliens and humanoids all existing int varied places in space and time. The “Soundtrack For The Voices In My Head” series is the music I hear to help accompany them while they are living, fighting, loving and dying. Join us.”

“The distant arias of angels and demons soak the fabric of space and time

Whose strains of battle for dominion of my yearning mortal mind

For their enchanting melodies, I have merely made a bed

A soundtrack for the voices in my head”

(Soundtrack For The Voices In My Head Vol. 1)

From 2010-2011 Klayton toured the world with Bret as the Celldweller live show. Klayton described it as a “Live DJ Performance Set”. Since  there are so many parts to be played in any Celldweller song, two guys could simply not perform them all live at once. What they did was have pre prepared tracks they wanted to play certain instruments (and sing) live on, by removing those parts from the track so that everything they weren’t currently playing live would be playing through a bunch of speakers. Instruments played live at the shows by both Klayton and Bret consisted of electric guitar, drums, synths, and keyboards, (with Klayton singing every track like usual of course). Complete with accompanying animations and other videos being played on a screen behind them, lots of lights and black lights and things that would make you feel like you’re inside something like the Tron universe. They toured like this in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Japan, Russia, and more, playing older songs that had been revised and remixed differently, and newer songs that hadn’t all been released yet on his upcoming album, Wish Upon A Blackstar. This tour however, was recorded and released as a CD with footage for a concert dvd/blu-ray all called Live Upon A Blackstar. This did not release until after Wish Upon A Blackstar.

Wish Upon A Blackstar was a phenomenal full-length album that got even more into the electronic side of things, but keeping more intensity. Every track was a masterpiece filled with crazy and complex sound design. By this time, Klayton has his own studio complex in Detroit. There is a drum room, a guitar room, a vocal booth, and other rooms, like monitoring rooms, and Blue Stahli’s studio, then there is his main room. The main room consists of gigantic racks filled with seemingly an infinite amount of all analog synths and other analog rack devices that he uses in all of his songs. All of this is recorded, arranged and produced through, Cubase, his DAW of choice. He is constantly getting more and more to add to his racks, as he demos each of them in short clips of sequences on Instagram. He is also an active Youtuber, posting videos every week. There are different series’ he has. Celldweller Production is a series where he shows different ways of how he creates, records, and produces different sounds and things in his music. Ask Celldweller is a series where Klayton answers questions that fans submit. Cellevision is a series of clips of things that happen with the people at FiXT and things they do in their often humorous everyday life. Recording Cessions is a series of videos set in a fly on the wall perspective of Klayton working on new Celldweller tracks. Finally, Demo Vault is a series of unreleased demos and things that were usually scrapped or just not finished.

Through all of this, Celldweller is wildly successful, having released 6 studio albums, 1 live album, 12 compilation albums, 10 EPs, 13 Singles, 6 Music Videos, 2 Remix Albums, countless remixes, 11 collaborations, 2 scores, and much more either not being counted right now, or still in the process. Also, he released a novel with writer Josh Viola, consisting of 3 acts, called Blackstar, following the album, full of space and scifi stories and a cyberpunk atmosphere as the majority of his work usually is. Accompanying the novel, he scored it all on his own in 3 acts as well with music he made to fit it. Many of his songs have been featured in a lot of video games, movies, tv shows, other films, and more. He is currently working on his new album, End Of An Empire, and has released the first 2 chapters, Time and Love already. On top of that and scoring a movie, he is also working on making tracks for his other side project, Scandroid. Scandroid is a musical collaboration with producer, Varian. Together they are making music with the following backstory:

“Red [Klayton and Varian’s combined alias] has scoured the depths of the ancient wasteland he calls home for something lost and buried - something revolutionary. What he unearthed was the New Retro sound of a forgotten era. Illuminated, he formed Scandroid to bring that sound into their world.

Based in an abandoned warehouse in Old Tokyo, surrounded by ancient technology and sound from the era of the 1980s. Beneath the shadow of the elite and unreachable Neo-Tokyo, he plans a revolution” -Fixt Store’s “About Scandroid”

Celldweller has an excessive and complex use of technology in all of his work, fusing and bending things, both digital and analog together in crazy amazing ways you would never expect. Klayton is Celldweller.