Name:Peter
Sex: Male
Age:1981-09-21
Status: Single
Here For: Community
Hometown: Roslyn
Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA
About Me: At the intersection of bumping your favorite pop tune on your stereo, the late night you spent kicking game to that special someone at the club and the lonely train ride home thinking of all things you should have said just a few fleeting moments before, there’s a quiet kid with a tilted hat and enough music to capture it all with music and a voice that is his uniquely his own—but will soon belong to everyone.
That kid is Peter Toh—a genre-smashing 24 year old artist/producer from Brooklyn, New York who is poised to be a major force in the clubs and on the airwaves in the months and years to come.
The young maestro’s genre-spanning mix of uptempo rock, soulful r&b, outsider electronica and straight up snap your fingers pop is unlike anything you’re hearing on the radio or in the rock or dance clubs right now—and that’s just the way he likes it.
One listen to Toh’s inventive music reveals that although he’s forever working out new arrangements, melodies and beats in his musical laboratory in Brooklyn, he’s all about creating the rush that comes with hearing a great hook that all people—all real people who know an amazing song when they hear one—can experience and relate to.
“I want to represent my generation as we really are,” says Toh with the earnestness of a musician on a serious cultural mission. “From Top 40 radio hits that you play for your little sister to the dirty rock and roll that makes you want to pick up a guitar and start a band, I want to strip away the pretense and bring it all back to songwriting that people can relate to. What you hear is what get.”
What you hear when you listen to Toh’s music is a collision of classic pop songwriting and innovative hip-hop style production that piles on dance floor-ready beats, sweeping keyboards and snyths and deep bass grooves that create a xxxx soundtrack to his distinctive vocal stylings. And what you get is the feeling that you need to hear it again and again—first to hear the unstoppable hooks and many more times to take all the music he’s so richly layering on each and every track.
Toh’s sound is both familiar and experimental. And oh yes—it’s also crazily flavorful. From the club banger “Shoes Of A Beast” and the hard-edged soul of “Criminal” to the dub-tinged, down low funk number “Ages” and the feel-good future club banger “More”, Toh is equally adept at channeling his love for confessional songwriters like Elvis Costello as his he is his appreciation for pure pop groups like New Edition and Jodeci.
“The craft of writing a great song with a verse, bridge and hook has been left to cornballs and American Idol singers, I want to bring it back to Motown and then push it forward to 2020,” he says of his musical ambitions.
If Toh sounds as if he’s thought it all over and decided exactly what he wants to do with the music that runs through him day and night, it’s because he’s been a gigging musician since his teenage days playing in rock bands in his native Long Island. While his first group with current Interscope artist Chris Clover, Museum, was turning heads in downtown Manhattan back when he and his band mates weren’t even old enough to drive, it was with the popular melodic punk group the Stryder (Equal Vision Records) that Toh made his first mark on a national level—even if it wasn’t exactly on target, it instilled in him a fierce DIY ethic and a belief in being true to your own vision that he carries with him today.
“Being in a punk band as a teenager was weird for me and my band mates,” says Toh of his days with the Stryder, the band that sparked his longtime musical kinship with Nick Wendel and xxxxNAMExxxxx, both of whom perform live with Toh today. “We’d book our own tours and drive in our van to VFW halls to play for hardcore kids, but all during the ride there, we’d be bumping Nelly Furtado and getting our minds blown by Outkast records. That scene wouldn’t accept us for who we really were—kids that loved party music that was intelligent.”
After the Styrder’s abrupt break up in late 2002, Toh set up shop in his parent’s old house (they had since moved out) in Long Island and made a handsome living writing beats for local rappers at this home studio. At was at this time that Toh began writing, arranging, recording and producing his own material while moonlighting as a student at the School Of Audio Engineering in Manhattan.
The decision to be a one-man band was prompted more by necessity than by choice. “I wasn’t talking to any of my old band mates and didn’t want to get caught up in another scene, so most everything I wrote was done on programmers and computers,” he explains. “The only person I saw back then was my girlfriend—and she hated my music. I needed to find my sound and keep pushing it to where I was happy with it. I knew that was something I had to do all on my own.”
After two “broke ass years stealing Ramen Noodles” in Queens, Toh and his former Styrder band mate Nick XXXX posted up in Bushwick, Brooklyn in DATE 2005 and began building out their own studio, Hidden Track Music. In between 14 hour recording sessions and more than a few nights sketching out new songs on acoustic guitars, Toh enlisted a backing group and began cutting his teeth before increasingly enthusiastic crowds in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn.
While Toh and his band were building a solid following through their shows at clubs like Pianos, Arlene’s Grocery and Sin-e, things really started moving after a chance encounter with an old fan of Museum at (of all places), a Chris Glover show at VENUE. That fan happened to be Vibe Magazine staffer Joanna xxxNAMExxxx, who was the first-ever recipient of the new music Toh had been crafting and refining over the past two years. “I had just finished my demo that day and told Joanna, ‘you’re the only person I am giving this music to, so you’d better make something happen’”, he laughs. The very next day, Toh received a phone call from former Island/Def Jam label manager and current manager to DMX, Randy Acker. After a few months of “feeling each other out, smoking in the studio and making sure things were real”, Acker officially signed Toh to a management deal and began hipping industry insiders to the prodigious new talent he was working with.
Since the release of his self-titled eponymous EP, Toh has continued to refine and expand his craft as a performing musician and producer (“that ain’t ever going to stop,” he jokes) while setting in motion plans to expand his work at Hidden Track and beyond. On the studio tip, Toh has already began producing the projects of those in his extended music family such as former Stryder drummer Scotty Denik’s R&B group Casanova Brown as well as fresh new musical talents from the New York area. “So long as there is great music being made, I want to be in the mix,” says Toh enthusiastically.
And there you have it—the vision behind the sounds that you’ll no doubt be hearing more of very shortly, no matter where you are.
Member Since: 7.16.06
Last Login: 1.07.07
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