Klayton

Klayton Albert (born Scott David Albert; June 17, 1969) is an American multi-instrumentalist from New York City who currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Immortal was a thrash metal band that put out one demo cassette in the late 1980s.

It was this cassette that got the attention of R.E.X. Records, who would later sign Klayton's band Circle of Dust.

Dan (lvl) was also a member of Immortal.

Circle of Dust got signed to R.E.X. Records, a small label that concerned itself primarily with underground Christian metal in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

He has led several electronic bands and has performed under a variety of stage names since the early 1990s.

His current projects are Celldweller, Scandroid, Circle of Dust and FreqGen.

Albert grew up in an Italian-American conservative Christian household in New York, where he attended church with his younger brother Dan and friends Buka and Klank (who would collaborate with him on a number of future music projects).

Albert never had formal training on an instrument, instead picking up whatever interested him and learning it himself.

He graduated from Farmingdale High School.

He took one semester of music theory in college but dropped out, explaining that "all they wanted to tell me is what I could and couldn't do according to the laws of music and I couldn't have cared less."

He eventually led to characterizing himself as being a "jack of all trades, master of none" when it came to musical instruments.

The first of these instruments was the drums.

In his teenage years, Albert listened to a lot of metal, only later being introduced to electronic music through bands such as Depeche Mode and Skinny Puppy.

All of these would influence Klayton's musical output in the early and mid 1990s, as he melded heavy guitars with layered samples and synths in the handful of industrial metal bands that he formed.

In later years, Klayton has referenced European drum'n'bass and Goa/psychedelic trance as influential on the sound of his project Celldweller.

Though Klayton's numerous projects in the early and mid 1990s were signed to Christian record labels and are generally considered Christian bands, Klayton took great pains to distance himself from that distinction and that subculture in the later 1990s by splitting from the CCM industry and forgoing any further performances at Christian venues.

Klayton's primary band throughout the 1990s was Circle of Dust, an industrial metal outfit he formed in 1990.

Despite heavy touring and some notable success in the underground industrial metal scene, Circle of Dust released only two proper albums, those being a self-titled debut in 1992 and a posthumous collection called Disengage in 1998.

In between the times of those releases, Klayton created two notable side projects under various aliases and with various collaborators.

The first of these was Brainchild, formed with the president of R.E.X. Records, Doug Mann.

The only Brainchild album, Mindwarp, was released shortly after the debut Circle of Dust album in 1992 and featured even heavier thrash metal influences.

Later, in 1994, the Mindwarp album was re-issued as a Circle of Dust album titled Brainchild to take advantage of a new distribution deal R.E.X. had signed without having to write and record a new album.

That same year, Klayton co-formed, along with the mysterious musician Buka, the supergroup Argyle Park, arguably the most controversial Christian industrial metal band in the short history of the genre.

While Circle of Dust was touring in 1994/1995, Klayton had been contacted on a number of occasions by illusionist Criss Angel, who wanted to collaborate on a magic show.

Argyle Park produced one album, Misguided, which was released to both high acclaim and heavy criticism in 1995 and featured a number of collaborators from mainstream industrial rock bands and Christian rock bands alike.

1995 would prove to be a busy and chaotic year for Klayton; he toured and released a complete re-recording of the self-titled Circle of Dust album while R.E.X., it turned out, was losing its distribution deal.

This caused the label, who refused to release any of their signed bands from contract, to slide into bankruptcy.

Essentially, Circle of Dust was trapped on a sinking ship, unable to record and release new music but also prevented from signing to any other label.

Later that year, Klayton decided to end Circle of Dust and find new means of creating and releasing music.

When R.E.X.'s legal troubles prevented Klayton from recording or touring in 1995, he put the band to rest and began writing with Angel.

The two combined their names and called the band Angeldust and spent upwards of two years creating a live theatrical show that would feature "Illusions, a live band, avant-garde characters that roam the landscape, robotic lighting, television monitors and projectors, performance art pieces and more."

He described this move and the reasoning behind it to great length in a 1998 interview with Christian metal publication HM Magazine and has reiterated his stance in more recent Celldweller interviews.

Klayton has stated repeatedly that he is a fan of Godzilla and the Kaiju genre in general.

In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, Klayton said that David Fincher's audio commentary on the films Seven and Fight Club have inspired him to record his own audio commentaries for his Beta Cession releases for Wish Upon a Blackstar.

They released their first album, Musical Conjurings from the World of Illusion, in 1998, the same year as the final Circle of Dust album.

It wasn't until early 2016 that Klayton bought the rights to his Circle of Dust music back from the record company it was owned by, and began remastering and re-releasing all of those albums, including the ones from Brainchild and Argyle Park.

In the deluxe remastered versions of those albums he added new Circle of Dust singles, which later became part of a brand new album, Machines of Our Disgrace, which Klayton says showcases what Circle of Dust would sound like in the modern day.

On September 16, 2017, he posted his wedding picture on Facebook.

He has three sons.