The Story

In December 2017, I was in Dubai for a work trip. I was eating dinner at a restaurant around the lake at the base of the Burj Khalifa, and I looked up. There wasn't a show running at the time, just these vertical columns of light, slowly coming and going along the side of the building. Nothing fancy. And for whatever reason, my brain went: you could do that on your house.

I want to be clear, there was no grand vision, no creative awakening over dinner. Just a guy looking at a tall building thinking about LEDs. But that one dumb thought set off a chain of events that, eight years later, ended with me releasing an electronic music album.

And I promise you, nobody is more surprised by that sentence than I am.

The Light Show

Our house in San Diego is mid-century modern with a bunch of horizontal roof lines, so my husband and I put LEDs along them and stuck a tiny Bluetooth speaker outside playing holiday music. It was barely a show, but people walking by would stop and watch, and a few of them actually danced in the street. Over a Bluetooth speaker. That was all the encouragement I needed.

Every year I pushed it further, more lights and better sound, with sequences I programmed to hit every beat in the music. By 2024 I was shutting down the street with a party permit, and by 2025 three hundred people showed up to watch a house covered in 100,000 LEDs with smoke machines, snow machines, spotlights on the roof, and a sound system that rattled the neighbors' windows. I went from a Bluetooth speaker to a full block party in six years, which sounds crazy unless you know how I'm wired. But the best part was never the lights. It was looking out at the street and seeing people I'd never met, dancing together to music I'd chosen. That was the first time I realized this wasn't just for me.

But the lights aren't the point of this story. The lights are how I found the point.

What Was Missing

To build the show I wanted, I needed music that matched specific light sequences, so I was spending hours searching for the right tracks and editing them to fit. And somewhere in the middle of all that editing I realized I didn't want to stop. Not the technical work of syncing lights to beats, but the creative work itself, choosing the sounds and shaping how they hit.

I knew that feeling. I used to live in it.

I grew up in a deeply religious household where music was part of everything. Piano lessons from age five, performing constantly, and I loved every second of it. But it was all church music. Music wasn't just something I did. It was something I did for God, and that was the only context I'd ever known for it. When I left the religion as an adult, I didn't sit down and decide to stop playing. Music and faith were so knotted together that when I pulled away from one, the other just disappeared. And I didn't understand what I'd lost until it had been gone for close to twenty years.

So I filled the space with other things. I built a career in tech, network engineering first, then sales engineering, and eventually the kind of work where you stand in front of rooms and convince people of things. I wrote a book, hosted a podcast, MC'd conferences around the world. I was good at all of it and I loved the work, but something was always missing.

I just needed a building in Dubai to start a chain reaction that brought it all back.

Music wasn't something that belonged to the religion I left. It was mine. It had always been mine.

What Is A DAW?

That was the literal Google search. Turns out, that stands for Digital Audio Workstation, and it's where the music gets made. I didn't know how any of it worked and had zero experience making music on a computer. But let me back up for a second.

When I was about twelve, I used to make little decorative wooden things for my mom. She loved country-style decorating but we couldn't afford much, so I'd cut them out of wood, paint them, and give them to her. One day we saw a really intricate piece in a store, two ducks shaped to form a heart with detailed cutouts and careful painting, way beyond anything I'd ever made. I told my parents I was going to make it. They gave me the kind of look you give a kid who's being adorable and unrealistic. Oh sure, go ahead and try.

I looked at them and said: I'm not going to try to make this. I'm going to do it.

And it hangs in my mom's house to this day.

That's how I'm wired. When I decide something is going to happen, it happens, not because I'm special but because I'll sit with the thing until it's done, however long it takes and however bad the early versions are. I taught myself networking that way, then programming, then how to walk into a room full of executives and run a demo that wins the deal. The pattern is always the same: open the tool, break it, figure out why it broke, fix it, repeat until you stop breaking it.

So I bought a DAW, set up a mic in my office, and started breaking it. It took two years of sounding terrible before I stopped sounding terrible, but now I have an album.

The Album

Smile: Ten Things That Make Me is ten tracks of electronic music, everything from house to breakbeat to speed garage. Each one started with something specific in my life, a memory or a moment I needed to put somewhere permanent.

I mixed every track myself, and for mastering, the final step that makes a mix sound like an actual record, I hired Metropolis Studios in London, the same studio that's worked with everyone from Queen to Adele. I sent them my tracks not knowing what to expect, and what came back sounded finished. One of the most useful things twenty years of tech taught me: know when to do the work yourself, and know when to call in the best.

The first single is Never Surrender. It's a techno track built around a simple idea: you don't give in when someone tells you to fall in line, whether that's the voice in your own head saying keep the music as a hobby, or the ones on a much bigger stage telling whole groups of people to sit down, shut up, and know their place. I wrote it because defiance isn't just a feeling. It's a practice. And right now, a lot of us need to hear that it's okay to refuse.

Who I Am

I'm Tim Schreyack, a queer electronic music producer and DJ based in San Diego. I'm also a sales engineer at a network automation company, and I'm keeping that career. I'm not pivoting. I'm expanding.

I'm releasing this album independently through JAMPHORIA, my own company. No label, no manager, no industry connections. I'm putting music on Spotify, Apple Music, and every streaming platform myself. I handled the copyrights and licensing, built this website, and learned the music business from scratch. Every skill I built in twenty years of tech went into making this happen. It turns out the discipline is the same. Starting from zero, figuring it out, refusing to stop. Whether that's data flowing across the internet or a house track flowing through a speaker.

There were plenty of moments along the way where the reasonable move was to stop, go back to what I'm already good at, and leave music alone. I've never been good at reasonable.

The kid who sat at a piano at five years old, who lost music when he lost his religion and spent twenty years not knowing what was missing, is about to be heard.