What is digitalflood.com?
Digitalflood.com is produced and directed by Christopher M. Welch with varied contributors over the years acting in supporting roles. The web site was founded in May 14, 1999 as a multimedia art project and has progressed through the years to a more professional format focusing on Chris’s music career and his associated pseudonym “DJ digitalflood”.
Our site passed the decade mark in May 2009 and has seen multiple iterations over its ten plus years of continuous development. The original digitalflood art/music project started as a concept back in 1990 and has in various mediums (print magazines, Internet web sites, audio cassettes, private computer bulletin boards, and live productions) continued without pause since its inception (albeit with the occasional hiatus to refresh the Chris’s artistic batteries). Our work has spanned from written word (poetry, prose, short stories, opinion/editorials, journalism/news), print art (photography, graphic art, classic pen & ink, painting, rendered graphics), audio (web casts, full length albums and original compositions, mash ups, mix tapes), and video (short movies and animated clips).
Most recently we have continued to focus on our most popular endeavor to date, which is our web cast “digitalflood Pirate Radio“. Pirate Radio has had thousands of listens over the last eight plus years (the show started in 2004).
We’ve had over seven million unique hits to our web site as a whole since 1999.
Digitalflood.com has always been at the forefront of technology and has matured over time with the Internet as a medium. We’ve experimented with a number of web technologies and refreshed our site every year since its inception. The result is that digitalflood.com has avoided becoming stales like many of the other fad web sites. We’ve always been an innovator and used leading edge web technologies. Our latest web site is no exception.
Digitalflood.com has seen contributions from many individual artists, musicians, and subject matter experts over time. The official staff “who’s who” showing the last eight years’ key contributors can be found here.
DJ digitalflood continues to push digitalflood.com’s capabilities to its limits and delivers the most refreshing music freely available on the Internet today. The result is timeless musical compositions that defy classification while being completely accessible without resorting to typical pop music trends or gimmicks.
Who is Christopher M. Welch?
Images of Chris Welch:
Christopher M. Welch (Chris for short) has been involved with computer science and communication network technologies for close to twenty years. Chris started work on what would become digitalflood.com (DF.com for short) back in 1990 with his bulletin board forum on a local dial up bulletin board system called “IPS BBS”. That forum would eventually become a simple HTML based web site in 1996. The site had no official name nor did it have a dedicated web address. The site relaunched in 1999 as “digitalflood.com” officially establishing the artistic venture under its own private production label of “DigitalFl00d Studios”.
Over time Chris transitioned the work from the production name of DigitalFl00d Studios to DigitalFl00d and eventually, over the last eight years, as simply “digitalflood”. This has all been part of the digitalflood brand evolution reflecting the changing types of content being produced, as well as, paralleling our continued reinvention of how that content is delivered to the end consumer through progressing technological capabilities. Chris has been working on DF.com steadily since since day one producing original artistic content, editorials, and chronicling his life (all before blogging was an accepted journalistic medium or commonly practiced hobby by mainstream popular culture).
Chris has been composing original music in a purely digital environment for over a decade, producing/composing his first song in 1995 on a Packard Bell Pentium I (75 MHz). Chris’s music composition, production and engineering work has come a long way since that time. Chris employs a number of analog instruments including guitars, bass, and even makes use of samples from children’s toys. Those elements are mixed with digital drum loops, free domain samples found through hours of hunting on the Internet, and programmed musical elements to create a unique aural soundscape. Genres bend as different styles of music are mixed with reckless abandon. The result is a one of kind sound that is at once unique, but catchy enough to be enjoyable. The music has been described as post-Goth or Industrial Emo by listeners though it is truly impossible to classify– it is simply “digitalflood”.
Chris also creates remixes and mash up’s of other artists’ songs incorporating both original and sampled elements. He also showcases his disk jockey and broadcast production talents on our site’s audio web cast program called digitalflood Pirate Radio.
Chris lives in Pine Bush, NY with his wife (Chrissy) and two daughters (Georgette and Emma). He has a cat named Groucho. Chris works, as a full time job, for a Top 10 cable company provider as the Senior Manager of CLEC Operations (basically he manages the Engineering team that provides telephone and voice services to the cable customers). He has worked in telecommunications for over sixteen years and has over twenty years of professional technology management experience. His professional resume can be found on LinkedIn at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/christophermwelch
LinkedIn Info:
In addition to music, Chris is a classically trained graphic artist specializing in digital photography, multimedia graphic design, and traditional graphic arts. This includes digital video and radio production. Chris has studied journalism, mass media, and marketing. Chris attended several years of college and majored in Visual Communications. He did not complete his AS degree and instead choose to pursue his professional IT career.
Chris is an IT/IS management professional with over a decade of experience in IT, IS, Network Engineering, and Telecommunications integration. Chris specializes in web server deployment and information management. This includes CMS, CRM, and dynamic content deployment. Chris also has managed a full service IP/ATM Video Head End with over 200 digital TV channels. Chris also has five plus years of project management, knowledge management, financial business analysis, risk management, and engineering design experience. He specializes in both the Agile and Scrum project management methodology. He also has a background in computer forensics and information security including Federal or state compliance audits (such as SOX).
Chris is an avid New York Mets fan. He enjoys writing, poetry, and spoken word (often called “slam” poetry). Chris is a big music fan and his tastes cross many boundaries. Chris is a big fan of history and continually studies the historical past of Orange County, NY. He is in the process of mapping out historic sites within the county on Google Earth.
Chris is a man of many talents and skills. In this sense Chris is an Internet thought leader and multimedia digital innovator, as well as, a modern Renaissance man.
