The origin of Industrial Sound Bank (a.k.a. In.So.Ba.) could be wrapped up in one short sentence: In 2010 veteran song writer/producer Eric Neuman was looking to “shed his skin and tackle something new”. But what’s new to someone who’s written and performed pretty much everything?

Nothing’s new.

So the final decision was to go back to the first steps of the musical roller coaster that’s been my life. I didn’t realize it at the time, but In.So.Ba started when I was a kid in the 90′s pulling blips and gurgles from an old computer and cheap keyboard. When band mates were hard to find or unwilling to play the music I was writing, I’d craft elaborate backing tracks in a sequencer and make music alone… which was essentially unheard of in 1996, and still brings awkward glances at gigs.

Through my teens and early twenties those glances and snide remarks scared me away from those beeps and blips that I loved. I joined rock bands, wrote beats for rappers, did session work as a guitarist and bassist for countless artists in countless genres; but at the end of the day my heart was closer to electronica than anything else I was playing. I’d stay up to ridiculous hours trying to make what I heard in my head appear on tape, and slowly the vision focused.

Not wanting to admit and accept what I was creating, I always came up with alter-egos and pseudonyms for the digital side of my art, almost making it an entity unto itself. First as The Afterlife Project (1996 – 98) then as E.Q. Jonez (1998 -2009) I crafted music that was electronic based. While proud of the work, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I was so busy trying to coerce earthly and organic sounds from digital sources that I was missing the possibilities that were offered by technology.

In a conversation about drum sounds for a song I was writing, a friend posed the question “Why do they need to sound real?” And that was the paradigm shift. I could find nothing wrong with my art except that it sounded synthesized. And there’s nothing wrong with that. So I finally embraced it. I began re-evaluating all my work, and found that the lucid moments in between bands and projects were golden, and In.So.Ba was born of those golden moments. It’s the stuff I was willing to turn my back on that ended up bringing me the most joy.

Heavily inspired by Nine Inch Nails, Daft Punk, The Crystal Method, and more recently DeadMau5; the sound of In.So.Ba. is bass heavy, infectious grooves with catchy melodies and thick layers of sound. And while “The Disk Platter Spins” was a blending of the past 16 years; the upcoming release “Light and Science” is slated to be a more cohesive and focused selection of tracks written more recently and designed to play together.