User:MitchProtheroe/sandbox

= Mitch Protheroe =

Mitch Protheroe (born May 25, 1993) is an American songwriter, performer, and visual artist.

Biography
Born in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, Mitch Protheroe has lived in the same state since his birth. Living with his parents and sisters, he utilizes his childhood home to produce music albums each year. He started taking guitar lessons at age 13, but it wasn't until he turned 16 in 2009 that he began to meet like-minded peers and started a progressive-rock band. Soon after, he began an experimental solo-project.

His music interest peaked in high school where he learned music theory in AP classes and began to write his own songs, and concurrently write songs and play shows with his band as their vocalist.

He continues to write music in the same home where he had started 14 years prior, and also plays drums with his friends when they can get together, sometimes performing at a local open-mic (either alone or with a friend).

In May of 2017, he began to create sharpie drawings that were abstract and psychedelic influenced, and eventually started picking up a paintbrush and using acrylic paint to similar ends.

Omni Optometrist (2008-2021)
At age 16, while taking music theory classes, Protheroe was motivated to experiment with electronic sounds using the popular digital audio workstation FL Studio, and began releasing music on Myspace under the name Omni Optometrist. He combined influences from his band, Termina, with other artists he discovered on Myspace, and put out a collection of songs called The Cosmos Beckons You. The release capitalized on 8-bit synthesizer sounds that were often heard in the original Gameboy game music, such as Pokemon, although he composed drum tracks for the songs that modified the sound to be more like heavy metal and progressive rock.

Since that album's release in 2008, he's released over 50 new records/EPs, which have varied in style but commonly gravitate towards jazz fusion and the mixture of other genres present in a song, namely electronic beats and groove metal.

While not mentioning an official hiatus for Omni Optometrist, the project seems indefinitely paused, as Protheroe is pursuing instrument playing over his prior habit of computer compositions.

Termina (2009-2012)
Protheroe became acquainted with four other high school musicians, Brandon Rohrbach, Colin Tevis, James Kominick, and John Fundyga, who all shared an interest in progressive music, and they began to write songs together in guitarist John Fundyga's basement. After a few weeks, they began performing their first written songs, and by autumn of 2010 they recorded an EP called "ConcEPts" at Viking Camel Studios, an in-home studio run by Jeremy Simon.

The lyrics entailed criticism of tyranny around the world, alien contact, and introspection.

Their reception in a live setting was mixed, but encouraging enough to pursue songwriting through until 2012. They started experiencing difficulty writing new songs, and because the band members were all attending different colleges and needed sustainable careers, it caused tension within the band. By the fall of 2012, Termina was on an indefinite hiatus.

The Solar Panel (2015-2021)
After radical changes in mental health and friend groups, Protheroe began to jam with guitarist Alex Ames and bassist Jarid Gorr, who had been playing together for years prior.

In 2018, they released their first demo, "A Ship of Forward Travels", which featured 2 songs they coordinated together called "Trying Together" and "Superior Flavor". The rest were experiments in free improvisation, mostly within the instrumental rock genre.

Over the next few years, they continued to record their weekly jam sessions, and put out several self-recorded EPs and albums, which were mostly intended for their own self-reflection.

In 2021, the band broke up due to interpersonal problems.

Solo releases (2014-present)
Mitch Protheroe began to release recorded improvised music on electric guitar, electric bass, and drums as early as 2014 with his release "Mad Swans", but it wasn't until summer of 2020 that he started to consider this method of writing to be his new primary musical outlet. By 2021, he put out an EP titled "Mandala", which was self-recorded and produced by musician/producer Justin Orenji, although the recording quality from Protheroe was garage-demo quality which made the process difficult.

After realizing that he had fulfilled his compositional goals with Omni Optometrist, Protheroe started releasing new music under his own name, Mitch Protheroe. He began to record everything with new equipment he had bought in his home studio where his family also resides. He uses free-improvisation to create dynamic music pieces that use less backbeats and repetition that is normally found in most genres of music. He classifies his sound as a mixture of instrumental progressive rock and jazz fusion.