Ben Heller | ben@ampeatermusic.com
Ben con­ceived of Ampeater with Nate Green­berg in the Fall of 2008, when he real­ized that the phrase “I work in music” sounds a lot bet­ter in bars than “I’m a Beowulf scholar.” He cur­rently works at Seri­ous Busi­ness Records in Soho, NYC and does free­lance web devel­op­ment on the side. You can view his port­fo­lio at Spruce.it.

Nate Green­berg | nate@ampeatermusic.com
Frus­trated by the stag­na­tion of his own music career, Nate teamed up with Ben Heller in early 2009 to cre­ate Ampeater.  Nate is cur­rently Ampeater’s de-facto for­eign cor­re­spon­dent.   He lives in Seoul, South Korea, where he sup­ple­ments his Eng­lish Teacher’s income through a hodge­podge of cre­ative pur­suits (but don’t let Immi­gra­tion catch wind of that!) of which Ampeater is prob­a­bly the most enjoy­able albeit cer­tainly the least lucra­tive.  He loves writ­ing for Ampeater because it gives him an excuse to talk to artists he admires.  Nathan plays in a num­ber of bands and side projects in gen­res as diverse as Pop, Funk, Korean Folk, Noise Rock, and Hip-Hop, although most peo­ple just know him as the guy play­ing Jazz on the street all night.  Nathan also runs a non-conformist pub­lic art blog, Art Art Rev­o­lu­tion.

Ben Las­man | lasman@ampeatermusic.com
Ben Las­man has writ­ten about music for CMJ, The New York Press and BOMB Mag­a­zine, and is the for­mer edi­tor of Yale’s Vol­ume Mag­a­zine. He plays gui­tars, com­put­ers, bass, drums, trom­bone, and sings in a vari­ety of bands, some real, oth­ers imag­ined, and DJs under the names Luftmau5, Piss­ing Crys­tals, Dirty RCA, King Fay Kong Raye and the Artist Cur­rently Known as Dad. Cur­renty a senior at Yale, he is writ­ing a novel about microna­tions and lives in a house with a big basement.

Gabe Birn­baum | gabe@ampeatermusic.com
Gabe Birn­baum is the for­mer art, film and tele­vi­sion edi­tor of the Copen­hagen Post; an IAJE award-winning com­poser; an inter­na­tion­ally acclaimed song­writer under the nom de plume Boy With­out God; and def­i­nitely doesn’t live in his par­ents’ house. He enjoys bour­bon whiskey, the songs of Leonard Cohen, the writ­ings of Julio Cor­tazar, and singing pop songs about drug-induced visions of his own death.

David Spiro | david@ampeatermusic.com
Real­iz­ing that only two things are cer­tain in life—death and Heisenberg’s Principle—David decided to grab the brass ring by writ­ing reviews of music he enjoys. To pick up extra spend­ing money he has been a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tional polit­i­cal econ­omy, an aca­d­e­mic author, and a man­age­ment con­sul­tant to banks and pri­vate equity firms. David lives in Tuc­son, Ari­zona and teaches part-time at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity in New York.

Jake Brun­ner | jake@ampeatermusic.com
Jake is a writer and musi­cian liv­ing in Philadel­phia. He lives in a time cube.

Nick Kelly | nick@ampeatermusic.com
Nick is known as a relent­less – and annoy­ing – pro­moter of music he likes and that other peo­ple should like too. So when he saw an oppor­tu­nity to pro­mote bands to more than just his doll set, he jumped at the oppor­tu­nity. A native of Brook­line, MA Nick has made the jour­ney slightly down­ward in the alpha­bet to Brook­lyn, NY, but swears he prefers the sweet sounds of bar mitz­vah music to any­thing com­ing out of the Burg.

Rick Andrews | rick@ampeatermusic.com
Rick spent his for­ma­tive musi­cal years in church base­ments and VFW’s going to sweaty shows by him­self, and in Nate’s room record­ing strange noises on his lap­top. He spends his days now in a win­dow­less build­ing in New York “fur­ther­ing his edu­ca­tion” by increas­ing its length by 33%. He mar­vels at the fact that he’s met and hung out with peo­ple who are younger than his AOL screen name, and thinks it’s strange that he knows some new­borns with face­book pro­files. He believes deeply that great music will always be liked if the lis­tener approaches it enough times. So, why does he like to such strange music? Because he made him­self do it.

Steve Glauber | steve@ampeatermusic.com
Steve is 23 years old and is cur­rently endur­ing the awk­ward post-collegiate phase of adult(ish)hood—where the super­stars in each pro­fes­sional sport are now younger than him and black olives start to taste alright. He likes all the same bands you do, but only their early stuff. Steve lives in Asto­ria, Queens where he gets on the train that goes to Man­hat­tan. As a boy, Steve watched a group of 8th graders play Silverchair’s “Tomor­row” at his older sister’s junior high tal­ent show, which thrust him along on this path of Rock n’ Roll fascination—the one he fol­lows to this day.

Mike Gutier­rez | mike@ampeatermusic.com
Mike grew up in the North­east, lis­ten­ing to Madonna, Sonic Youth and De La Soul. When not study­ing phi­los­o­phy, he fid­dles with unfin­ished novels, finishes short sto­ries, and con­tributes fic­tion and music cov­er­age to var­i­ous mags, blogs and reviews, includ­ing QRO, Ampeater, and Gigan­tic Sequins. The run on sen­tence is his guilty pleasure.

John Ganiard | john@ampeatermusic.com
John will shortly hold a bach­e­lor of arts degree in phi­los­o­phy. He will then hope­fully go back to school to write some more things (not phi­los­o­phy). John has writ­ten pre­vi­ously for Foxy Dig­i­talis, school, and his own per­sonal edi­fi­ca­tion. John lives in Saint Louis and likes black metal, Michi­gan foot­ball (still), bad beer, and half-heartedly com­pil­ing found sound.

Kaylea Nel­son | kaylea@ampeatermusic.com
Kaylea’s a grad­u­ate stu­dent (gasp!) in astro­physics (GASP!) who does this mostly so she can tell peo­ple about it dur­ing con­fer­ences and give them the illu­sion that she does some­thing else with her life other than stargaze. She puts up the daily posts and fixes Nick’s hor­ri­ble hor­ri­ble spelling mis­takes. Seri­ously, he writes like a child. Any­ways, Kaylea lives in New Haven with her man­per­son (see Heller, Ben above) and is prob­a­bly your best point of con­tact if you see some­thing fu*ked up on the site.

Rashid Gal­adanci | rashid@ampeatermusic.com
Rashid Gal­adanci would like to say that he makes his liv­ing as the 8-string gui­tar player in his band, Black Sci­ence The­ory. In real­ity, he’s an Orga­ni­za­tion and Strat­egy Con­sul­tant at Booz Allen Hamil­ton in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. and dab­bles in music and web-design.