BT

Brian Wayne Transeau (born October 4, 1971), known by his initials as BT, is an American musician, DJ, singer, songwriter, record producer, composer, and audio engineer.

An artist in the electronic music genre, he is credited as a pioneer of the trance and intelligent dance music styles that paved the way for EDM, and for "stretching electronic music to its technical breaking point."

BT was born in Rockville, Maryland on October 4, 1971.

His father was an FBI and DEA agent, and his mother a psychiatrist.

BT started listening to classical music at the age of 4 and started playing classical piano at an early age, utilizing the Suzuki method.

By the age of eight he was studying composition and theory at the Washington Conservatory of Music.

He was introduced to electronic music through the breakdancing culture and the Vangelis score for the film Blade Runner, which led him to discover influential electronic music artists such as Afrika Bambaataa, Kraftwerk, New Order and Depeche Mode.

In high school, he played drums in one band, bass in a ska band and guitar in a punk group.

At 15, he was accepted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, where he studied jazz and enjoyed experimenting, such as running keyboards through old guitar pedals.

BT is a multi-instrumentalist, playing piano, guitar, bass, keyboards, synths, sequencers, the glockenspiel, drum machines and instruments he has modified himself.

His process for creating songs typically starts with composition on basic instruments, like the piano or an acoustic guitar.

In 1989, after dropping out of Berklee, BT moved to Los Angeles, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to get signed as a singer-songwriter.

Realizing he should focus on the electronic music he was more passionate about, he moved back to Maryland in 1990 and began collaborating with friends Ali "Dubfire" Shirazinia and Sharam Tayebi of Deep Dish.

Together they started Deep Dish Records.

Early in his career, BT worked under a variety of musical aliases, including Prana, Elastic Chakra, Elastic Reality, Libra, Dharma, Kaistar and GTB.

In the early years of BT's career, he became a pioneering artist in the trance genre, this despite the fact that he does not consider himself a DJ, since he infrequently spins records and comes from an eclectic music background.

When he started out, such common elements as a build, breakdown and drop were unclassified.

BT's was a unique interpretation of what electronic music could be.

His first recordings, "A Moment of Truth" and "Relativity", became hits in dance clubs in the UK.

His productions were not yet popular in the US, and he was initially unaware that he had become popular across the Atlantic, where UK DJs like Sasha were regularly spinning his music for crowds.

Sasha bought BT a ticket to London, where BT witnessed his own success in the clubs, with several thousand clubbers responding dramatically when Sasha played BT's song.

He also met Paul Oakenfold, playing him tracks that would make up his first album.

He was quickly signed to Oakenfold's record label, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers.

BT's 1995 debut album Ima, released on Oakenfold's label, was a progressive house effort.

The opening track, "Nocturnal Transmission", was featured in The Fast and the Furious.

The album also featured a song called 'Loving You More' with Vincent Covello.

Blending house beats with sweeping New Age sounds, Ima helped to create the trance sound.

"Ima (今)" is the Japanese word for "now".

BT has stated that it also means many other things and that the intention of the album is to have a different effect for everyone.

Following the release of Ima, BT began traveling to England regularly.

It was during this time that he met Tori Amos.

In 2010, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album for These Hopeful Machines.

He creates music within myriad styles, such as classical, film composition, and bass music.

BT holds multiple patents for pioneering the technique he calls stutter editing.

This production technique consists of taking a small fragment of sound and repeating it rhythmically, often at audio rate values while processing the resultant stream using advanced digital processing techniques.

BT was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for his song "Somnambulist (Simply Being Loved)", recognized as using the largest number of vocal edits in a song (6,178 edits).

BT's work with stutter edit techniques led to the formation of software development company Sonik Architects, developer of the sound-processing software plug-ins Stutter Edit and BreakTweaker, and Phobos with Spitfire Audio.

BT has produced, collaborated, and written with a variety of artists, including Death Cab for Cutie, Howard Jones, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Madonna, Markus Schulz, Armin van Buuren, Sting, Depeche Mode, Tori Amos, NSYNC, Blake Lewis, The Roots, Guru, Britney Spears, Paul van Dyk, and Tiësto.

He has composed original scores for films such as Go, The Fast and the Furious, and Monster, and his scores and compositions have appeared on television series such as Smallville, Six Feet Under, and Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams.

He was commissioned to compose a four-hour, 256 channel installation composition for the Tomorrowland-themed area at Shanghai Disneyland, which opened in 2016.