Hi…

I’m ien.

Story time… I’m a trans gender-odd being with a penchant for clashing trousers and making funny noises. My dad used to do the Donald Duck voice in curses to make me laugh, and I grew up knocking on the top of my skull to make an ‘empty’ noise in a poor imitation of him.

In middle school, I decided I liked the sound of the word oboe and, when the conductor told me it was too hard an instrument, I told a giant fib to my mother that he’d said we needed to rent an oboe. I played through the first year of college when a particularly evil concerto, apocryphally written because Mozart couldn’t sleep with someone’s wife, made me literally run screaming from the music department. I had been taking what turned out to be a sound design class, so I didn’t get very far in my run and ended up falling into the deep end of technical theater.

Through the years I’ve picked up quite the little collection of tricks… I have managed to pick up a miniature door, a hoard of telephone ringer bells, more whistles than should be logical and, on one show, I discovered the perfect recipe for liquified barbie flesh. It made quite the useful squelch. I picked up a flute, a waterphone, a violin, a trombone and, at one point, two melodica. I have modified many dolls, a few radios, and a tape deck to do my bidding.

Anyway… I ramble. ien does sound. And other stuff.