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Above - the analog synthesizer used to create The Secret Life of Semiconductors.

Secret Life is a collection of my electro-acoustic music from the period from 2002 to 2009. It consists of studio works, sometimes referred to as tape music which were created in a controlled studio environment where the final result, the sounding music, was self-produced with little or no live performance involved.

Much of the music on this album was made on instruments of my own design, the best example being the title track. I began developing modular analog synthesizers in 2003 after tiring of trying to bend digital instruments in like manner. It's not the sonic differences between these two extremes which put me to this task. While different, both are viable and I think it's good to have these choices. It was the control limitations of the closed architecture associated with most digital instruments which presented the challenge. For many composers this wouldn't be an issue. For me however it made the creative process, my schick, quite laborious.

The album's name is an abbreviation of the title track - The Secret Life of Semiconductors. I often struggle with names, yet have come to appreciate the mystery that Secret Life suggests.

Peter Grenader studied composition with an emphasis in electro-acoustic music at the California Institute of the Arts under the guidance of Barry Schrader and Morton Subotnick.

In 2002, Grenader's Electrolux won the Periòdic Experimental Music Festival in Barcelona, Spain. Other appearances include an evening performance at the 2003 SEAMUS National Conference, the University of North Texas, California Institute of the Arts, Stony Brook University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, University of Texas at Austin, Georgia State University's Pulse Field, the Florida Electro-Acoustic Music Festival and the Electric Rainbow festival at Dartmouth; the Oden Dance Company's production of Chronicals; CKCU-FM, Ottawa, Canada; WOBC 91.5 FM in Oberlin, Ohio and Resonance FM, London, on various podcasts including Sonic State and KCET and as guest host for Los Angeles based KCSN-FM's Galactic Voyager radio program .

Further palmares include The Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, Holland and GMEB in Bourges, France as well as two wins at the Virginia Commonwealth University Music Festival.

More recently Grenader was a featured composer at the 17th American Composer's Forum Salon in Venice and at the invitation of composer and sound artist Steve Roach served as a panel speaker at the fifth annual TapeOpCon in Tucson, AZ along with Dave Wright of Not Breathing.

In 2007 Grenader contributed to a Library of Congress project with Morton Subotnick and returned as a TapeOpCon panelist with Steve, Dave and Alessandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails/. Later that year in an event that composer Barry Schrader termed as historic, he performed before a sold out audience in AnalogLive! - a large-scale collaborative ensemble performance with composers Gary Chang, Alessandro Cortini, Richard Devine, Loren Nerell, Chas Smith, Thighpaulsandra of Spiritualized and video artist Paul Tzanetopoulos at the REDCAT Theater, located in the Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles. Photos frorm that event can be seen here

A past member of the SEAMUS board of directors (Society of Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States), he is the co-founder of the Electro-Acoustic Research which produces analog electronic music instruments under the guise of Plan B, as well as custom gear for Nine Inch Nails, Chilli Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, Guns N' Roses, film composer Gary Chang and Steve Roach.

Peter Grenader performs at Analoglive,11/16/07

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