Hey, I’m Zach

My work exists at the confluence of creativity, culture, and exploration. I write stories, play music, and produce creative media that finds narratives within our communal experiences and I convey them through words, audio, and film.

At times I’ve been a DJ, a suit in the music business, a radio host & producer, a grant writer, a monk, the oldest guy in a classroom, a foreigner living in Italy, a copyright manager, a podcast creator, and a nonprofit consultant.

I grew up surrounded by cows and corn in a farm town between Baltimore and Washington, DC. I was equally at home in the woods, in front of the TV playing video games and watching movies, swimming with my shoes on in Bennett Creek, and stealing my brother’s cassettes to blast Guns N’ Roses on my Fisher Price tape player.  From a young age, I remember writing stories and “sequels” based on video games and comic books. 

Music has always fascinated me. I remember staring wide eyed at the Abraxas LP jacket while digging through my parents’ records. But in high school, I stumbled upon Experience by The Prodigy – I had never heard anything like it. It catalyzed a lifelong exploration of music and the culture surrounding it. I wrote screenplays using Sasha and Digweed mixes as the score and I would often attend Fever in Baltimore. I spent a semester in London, England in 2001, wandering the streets of Hackney Wick trying to locate the warehouse parties by listening for the thump of bass speakers.  

I bought a set of turntables after returning to the US and began mashing together any vinyl I could get my hands on. Gorillaz mixed with Steve Martin comedy albums, mixed with the 2001 soundtrack, The Chemical Brothers, and Pink Floyd – it was weird. It was only when I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and met the DSSF crew that I learned how to play coherent DJ sets and dove deep into hip hop, drum and bass, and electronic music. 

Around the same time, I discovered books like the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada, and the Upanishads.  As I got deeper into the books, I got deeper into the roots of the music I was DJing and I began to feel a connection that eluded articulation. Surely, I thought, there is a link between our integral nature and the purity of the creative act.  Something that fosters the growth of communities and social movements evident in the burgeoning rave culture, the music and protests of the Woodstock era, the origins of hip hop, disco…a perennial seed of expression and freedom constantly reasserting itself. Seeking to define this link eventually led me to join the Ramakrishna Order in 2010 and live in a monastery in Trabuco Canyon, California for almost two years. 

In 2012, I enrolled in a music degree program at the University of Colorado in Denver, where I realized I had a talent for working in the “business” of music. Shortly after graduating, I moved to Los Angeles and began managing IP rights at Universal Music Group.

During that time, I met the Tastemakers, a group of DJs in LA, and I started sitting in as a co-host during their weekly show on Dash Radio where we celebrated and lampooned DJ culture and ourselves.  As Tastemakers grew, I developed a spinoff show, The Rewind, which ran for over 30 episodes. In 2020 we launched Tastemakers as a 24/7 station with over 40 programs. 

In 2021, I sold everything, quit my job, and moved to Italy seeking a new adventure.  I graduated in 2023 with a masters degree in the Economics and Management of Arts and Culture from the University of Bologna, which rekindled a passion for creative writing. Most recently, I’ve been working as a grant writer and fundraising consultant for nonprofit arts organizations. 

Today, three years deep into Italy and with a fresh degree, I find myself at another crossroads.  After leaving the relative stability and career paths of the monastery and the music business, I am auditing my life and realizing the common thread through it all is writing.  Whether I was overborrowing from video games to write screenplays, sequencing music and audio snippets as sound collages, or interviewing DJs and producers on my radio show, I have always sought to express a narrative conveying the link between the creative act and our fundamental selves. 

I still haven’t been able to fully define this link, and I suspect it defies a tidy explanation, but working within this fuzz does provide some good stories – and maybe that’s enough.