Mike's Page

One fine day in the early 1980s a 13 year old boy was walking down the street after being dismissed from middle school. He is being followed by a large group of other kids who are energetically throwing rocks at him. The reason for the rock throwing is because our 13 year old is wearing combat boots, military fatigues, a torn up spider man t-shirt, studded wrist bands and spikey hair. Finally he arrives at his destination and walks into the basement entrance of a large church to attend his mandatory religious instructions class. He is carrying nothing but a small battery powered tape recorder. At some point a nun enters the class and begins to teach her lesson. Suddenly she is rudely interupted by the raucous, jagged sounds of The Dickies song "Hideous". A few minutes later the 13 year old is walking home and dodging more rocks.

That 13 year old was Michael Angelo Ruberto. From an early age mike's biggest musical influences were his two older brothers who had an affinity for obscure, underground music including bands such as Caberet Voltaire, Gary Numan, Kraftwerk and Throbbing Gristle. A few years after the scenario described above Mike came into posession of a cheap Casio synthesizer and a 4 track cassette studio. His first recordings were rather flowery sounding pop numbers typical for the times. After building a microphone from electronic junk Mike's recordings got somewhat more interesting as his songs started containing found sounds, dialog snippets from TV and metallic percussion from old brake drums and pipes dragged home from vacant lots and junkyards. Then Mike discovered the trick to put his Casio synth into it's factory diagnostic mode and things have never been the same since.

Over the years Mike has enjoyed particiapating in a wide array of musical and pure noise projects. The first band he joined was Radon Basement in the late 80s where he explored the more ephemeral aspects of combining synthesizers with dozens of guitar pedals. Radon Basement never reached ground level and Mike moved on to form his own band Neural Control Disorder in 1989. NCD was a duo with Mike running the synths and drum machine and Nathan (Nato) Haley on guitars. At this point in time Mike had amassed an impressive array of the then passe' analog synthesizers from the previous two decades. Neural Control Disorder was a bizarre combination of early Nitzer Ebb, The Cure and Glam Metal and the band began accumulating a small but loyal following in 1990 and performed a few gigs with the Punk band 2.5 Children out of Delaware. Unfortunately, later that year Nato had a personal crises and moved back to his family home in Ohio. NCD continued on as a solo project for a few more years but Mike found himself working backup synths for a number of other bands and spendng less time on his own material. He also found his technical abilities in demand by recording studio owners trying to upgrade their equipment.

In 1992 Mike, with help from one of his brothers purchased his first digital sampling synthesizer (also Casio). The resulting change in his music was quite significant. In 1993 Mike abandoned his old method of writing songs on his drum machine and using it to trigger samples and synths in favor of a computer and a Midi editing program. NCD was back in full production and another guitarist was found to fill the hole left by the former member. As luck would have it the times and tastes had moved on and now Grunge and Techno were all most people were interested in and Mike's band floundered, unable to get gigs or cooperation from the local music scene in Philadelphia. Further problems with the new guitarist led to Mike finally disbanding NCD. After this Mike did backup work with a number of techno/house bands including Tik-Tek, Monster Lab, Ego Trip and some others whos names are happily forgotten. At this point Mike gave up on writing music and playing in bands and concentrated all his free energies to something completely different, constructing modular analog synthesizers. For several years he remained out of sight in his lab tinkering with circuitry and soldering irons. Around this time Mike also started his synthesizer repair business.

One winter evening in 1999 Mike was working late at his job at 50 Broadway in Manhattan when he got an email from an aquaintance he had met in a bar. The sender was a guy who did a one man DnB act and played a few concert circuits around the city. The guy was supposed to do a gig that night which had been advertised as having a synthesist in collaboration with him but the synthesist never showed up. Remembering what Mike had told him about his synth projects the DnB guy was hoping Mike would do a fill-in and the gig starts in two hours. Two hours later Mike came up from the subway in Alphabet City carrying a grey camcorder case and found his way to the club where the show would be not knowing what to expect. He hadn't heard a single recording of the guys act or seen him perform. It was going to be a night of suprises. The other performers and members of the audience kept inquiring about the contents of the strange grey case Mike carried. Inside that case were 9 small black and white boxes covered with knobs and switches and big tangle of patch cords. He removed them from the case and arranged them on a table. After 10 minutes of plugging in patch cords according to some plan scribbled on a torn sheet of paper the duo was ready to perform. During the performance Mike twisted knobs and pressed buttons along with the beat of the music and the little homebuilt synthesizer screamed, roared and burbled it's way through the mix like a possessed thing. Its sounds ranged from high violin-esq tones to shortwave radio noise to deep sub-bass and pure distortion. Mike closed the set with mock guitar solo played with two knobs. The entire crowd was on its feet and applauding. Later that night Mike was having a conversation with the organizer of the +/- concert circuit and learned that this crowd never gives standing ovations to anybody.

That experience inspired Mike to more solo work with his homemade creation and he performed all over the NYC area under various names for a few years until he met his wife. Together they founded Somnium Seven, and now Mike's electronic noise finally has a voice.