It was the early 90’s in suburban Massachusetts. She was a shy preteen that didn’t do well in school, routinely mocked by classmates for her complete lack of style and self confidence. It didn’t help that her last name rhymed with ‘chicken pecky’. During free periods she was known to sit alone at the back of a classroom, entertaining herself with her teacher's collection of boxed activities like jigsaw puzzles and rug hook kits. A favorite was a string art project featuring a geometric owl with large round eyes and a melon-shaped body. She’d completed many such owls, as there were multiple kits.

Across the entire back of the classroom stretched a glass window. And on one cold rainy afternoon that window framed an ominous grey sky, big black clouds and skeletal trees that swayed in the wind. The girl sat in a little wooden rocking chair with a half-finished owl in her lap, carefully looping colored strings around tiny brass nail heads. Suddenly a bolt of lightening smashed through the window and hit her so hard that the braces flew out of her mouth!

The girl lived but was knocked unconscious for three days. When she awoke she described a vivid dream. She claimed to have met a man from the future, a man who had also been knocked unconscious at one point in his life. The man spoke of encountering a mysterious shape-shifting entity named Kro Nyzr. Through conversations with this man, the girl began to develop a strange desire to record music, and an urgent need to protect the environment.

Once the girl completed rehabilitation, she got to work on a series of sound recordings using equipment belonging to her older brother who was an aspiring audio engineer. The resulting tracks were narrowly distributed on cassette tapes and universally disparaged. A fellow nerd said, “Sorry girl, you really blew it. Try again maybe?” The school paper declared, “Boring, Sad and Repetitive: Trauma Survivor Records Her Issues”. Others cringed at the stiff drums and fake violins. But the girl dismissed the criticism. Her attitude had changed. She went on to DJ at clubs and parties in neighboring towns and developed a small but devoted following. Yet that emerging success didn’t satisfy her. She started to envision tall buildings that would emulate living organisms, taking energy from the sun and overflowing with plants as well as humans. So she plotted a course toward studying architecture, and would eventually leave music behind.