Jerry Paper

Nathan stated that as a "pretentious teenager", they "refused to listen to anything that wasn't 1966 to 1968."

Therefore, it was "part of [their] personality" that they despised electronic music.

However, they experimented with their friend's Roland HS-60 synthesizer, finding the sounds it produced fascinating.

This inspired them to make electronic music as a way of taking the "challenge" of "find[ing] a way to like" the genre.

Lucas Nathan (born August 7, 1990), best known by the stage name Jerry Paper, is an American musician, singer, songwriter and producer.

They began releasing music in 2009, with their first projects being Zonotope™ and the noise music project Diane Kensington Devotional Band.

Nathan began producing music in 2009, and their first project was Zonotope™, a four-album "propaganda series" promoting a Southern California-based "alternative spiritual community" named the Temple of Pure Information and Mainframe Devotion.

They also had a noise project named Diane Kensington Devotional Band, which depicts Nathan as the eponymous female who starts a fictional religion based on traveling into the "space between the 1 and the 0" through the ritual of "Trance Channels".

The name of Jerry Paper first appeared in the credits of the Zonotope™ album Excellent Realms (2010), where Paper was given a "special thanks" for "building The Mainframe."

The story of the project involves Paper quitting from the spiritual community setting of Zonotope™ to find a "less orthodox alternative spirituality."

Nathan described the music of Jerry Paper as "slightly less abstract" than their works for Zonotope™, and the project's titular character is caused by a "ritual" that transforms Nathan into Jerry Paper.

Paper often wears a garland and a silk robe and acts like a "weirdo" who does "whatever the hell [they want]," such as become "romantically involved with a giant chameleon" and dance "like someone who just discovered movement five minutes ago," Koen van Bommel stated.

They subsequently created the persona-based project Jerry Paper, and has been releasing music under the name since 2012.

Nathan said that as a child, they were influenced to learn music by the fact that "all [their] friends were making music."

They learned how to play "The Simpsons Theme" on the piano when they were five, played bongos for their school band, and were a drummer.

They learned how to play the Misfits song "London Dungeon" on bass guitar (in eighth grade), made psychedelic folk recordings in their bedroom with Sony Acid, and performed in various bands at school.

The first group they were in was a comedy rock band named The Corrupt Ice Cream Vendors.

They got into several noise and psychedelic acts like Growing and Devendra Banhart in their teen years after being exposed to them via the magazine Arthur, and later got into free jazz and krautrock.

Nathan originally wanted to perform in the "cool band[s]" they saw at school and their summer camps, but they were turned down by all of them due to their "nerdy" look, which influenced them to become a solo artist.

Nathan explained that they wrote International Man of Misery (2013), "a cartoonish version of depression," as a way to poke fun on the "ridiculously melodramatic thoughts" they went through at the time.

Fuzzy Logic (2013) is about how modern living is complicated by technology and politics.

Feels Emotion, released on February 11, 2014, involved Nathan taking on, as Decoder magazine put it, more "ambitious" production techniques than their previous albums such as in sampling, an example being the cat sounds on "Holy Shit."

The LP also has some tracks where Nathan focused on non-repetitive pop structures instead of the typical verse–chorus form, including "I Feel Emotions," "Unless It’s," "Other Please," and "Heartbreak Module #3."

On August 24, 2014, Nathan released what they considered their "first successful concept album," the Jerry Paper LP Big Pop For Chameleon World, a soundtrack for their Unity game Dr. Javer's Genneheigen's Chameleon World.

The album explores simulacra, looking for "the dividing line" between a real object and a simulated version of it.

In doing so, it uses synthesized replications of acoustic instruments, such as a square wave keyboard sound meant to be a harpsichord texture.

According to The Fader, the use of these sounds gives the album a more "uncanny" vibe than Nathan's previous releases.

The same palette of instruments were later used on their next album Carousel (2015).

For making Carousel, Nathan wrote the songs in the same manner as for their previous release; however, the analog keyboard Nathan usually used for creating their music had broken, meaning they had to rely on digital synthesizer sounds for Carousel.

they said the album consisted of a bunch of "hilarious sounds."

As they described making the LP's lead single, "I was just trying to come up with the funniest sounds to go together – like tubular bells, and standup bass, and harpsichord, and then it goes into disco funk."

Toon Time Raw! was recorded with the band BadBadNotGood at their studio in Toronto.

The band acted as Nathan's anonymous backing band, being billed as "Easy Feelings Unlimited".

Toon Time Raw! involves anthropomorphic animals dealing with human issues.

The record was performed with a record release party on June 19, 2016 at Brooklyn's art gallery place Secret Project Robot.

It was Nathan's first headlining performance that they performed with a backing band, a contrast from their previous live performances where they sang with machines performing the backing tracks.

As Madison Bloom of Audiofemme covered the event, "it was an evening of undeniably odd birds, but what a wonderful thing to see when so many modern bands are required to be ultra slick and fronted by supermodels," and the band's setup had "great versatility via keyboards, guitar, pedal effects, and flute."

On September 15, 2017, American rapper Kari Faux released "Gotta Know," a track from her extended play Primary.

Nathan produced the track under the Jerry Paper pseudonym and also received a "featuring" credit on the song.

Faux noticed Nathan's work via the "suggested artists" feature on Spotify, and, as she explained, she "was stuck on [their] music for a good three months, that was all I was listening to, and I would catch myself rapping to [them]."