About Me

My real name is Darren Matthew Binkowski. I was born in San Diego, and it's been where I spent most of my childhood. I loved the beach, the bay, and the many parks we had around town, from Belmont to Balboa. I love learning and creating; the Children's Museum was one of my favorite places growing up, since it was one of the few places where I could do both. When I wasn't out of the house, I would be playing video games. I grew up with a Nintendo DS and 3DS, spending my time playing both new titles and retro games. These games would have a significant effect on my compositional style much later down the line.

At around ten years old, I moved to San Marcos, a suburb forty minutes north of Downtown. Nothing really goes on up here, so I've become a man of many hobbies. I love long-distance cycling, both on and off the trails. I love sailing, flowers, making coffee, listening to vinyl records, and a bunch of other stuff too. If it involves me making something, I probably enjoy doing it.

I started arranging when I was eleven. Or something that resembled it anyway. My first foray into music was arranging playable tunes in a phone game called "Magic Piano", starting with Tree of Life: Trunk, a piece from a Nintendo game called Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon.

The first true score I wrote was called Tsukuyomi, finished just before my thirteenth birthday, followed by Divine Winds and Refur by the end of my middle school years. The 'Middle School Trio' as I would call it was composed in a rudimentary phone app called "Notation Pad", and none of it was really meant to be played.

Some important developments would come in High School when I was introduced to Garageband in a Digital Audio class. I took to music production like a moth to a flame, upgrading to Logic Pro X and venturing into the world of songwriting. I also learned MuseScore around this time, which would lead me down a rabbit hole of composing 'for real'. Rite of the Cormorant, The Dreaming Girl Suite, Loma, Autumn's Passacaglia, and so on; it's all been the result of my never-ending drive to make something better. Writing teaches; once I'm done writing, I'll have already learned so much that it's time to do it again–– just better this time.