Jay Haze

Jay Haze is an American recording artist originally from Avoca, Pennsylvania. He records under the names Fuckpony (Get Physical, BPitch Control), Subversion (Souljazz, Futuredub), Bearback (Tuningspork Records - together with Samim Winiger), Jay vs. Ricardo (with the Chilean artist Ricardo Villalobos) and several other monikers.

Jay remixes many artists and recently collaborated with the renowned French composer Yann Tiersen (of Amélie soundtrack fame).

He started with music at the age of 8 and plays guitar, piano, cello, bass violin, flute, trumpet, bass guitar and sings. He was known as a Glass sculptor years before gaining attention internationally for his music productions and dj skills.

In his late 20s Jay dedicated more and more of his time to independent fundraising to help with many of today's problems and catastrophes. His latest effort Djs4Drc (www.djs4drc.org) raised in addition to money, lots of awareness for victims of rape and abandoned children in the war torn country of Democratic Republic of Congo. Prior to this he organized a project for the victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami which claimed the lives over almost 300,000 people. The project entitled "tsunami relief" launched a new style of philanthropy for Jay as he successfully raised money for different causes without any major backing or corporate support. He currently resides in Lima, Peru where he is launching a new project entitled "creative-beats" teaching electronic music production to impoverished children throughout the third world, collaborating with existing social programs and networks. He recently released a short film portraying what life is like in the slums of Lima, Peru.

In the early 2000s Jay was involved in the emerging digital revolution within the music industry when he co-founded (together with professor Bjoern Hartmann of Berkeley) Textone internet label. Textone was one of the first record labels of its kind to offer the music online free of charge, with a forum attached to the music so the artists could get instant direct feedback. Textone successfully proved how far electronic music could reach globally when the financial aspects of running a record label were eliminated. In its first year it garnered millions of downloads from all parts of the world surpassing numbers of most major record labels at the time. In addition to music Textone promoted Creative writing on current trends in technology and copyrights. All of the work on Textone was under the Creative Commons license, to which Textone was a huge supporter.