Celldweller

Detroit-based musician and sound designer Klayton operates most prominently under the Celldweller banner, an expansive endeavor that merges rock, electronics, and orchestral textures across shifting stylistic boundaries. Emerging from an industrial-metal foundation, Klayton wove drum'n'bass and trance textures into the earliest Celldweller output, beginning with the 2003 debut, before integrating metal with dubstep and EDM on 2012's Wish Upon a Blackstar; 2017's Offworld later drew from shoegaze. Frequently centered on science-fiction and cyberpunk motifs, the music carries a strongly cinematic quality that has placed it in numerous films, television programs, and video games. Klayton has cultivated an ardent following through both these recordings and his YouTube channel, where he routinely shares footage of his studio work. Beyond Celldweller, he also maintains the synthwave project Scandroid and the modular-synth explorations of FreqGen.

Although originally based in New York City, Klayton entered the metal and industrial scenes through multiple groups in the late 1980s. After the breakup of Circle of Dust, Angeldust, and Argyle Park, he launched solo Celldweller recordings in 1999. The self-titled debut arrived four years later on Position Music/Esion Media, presenting an intricate blend of trance, drum'n'bass, metal, and alternative rock; the album earned strong support within online communities and saw every track licensed for television, film, or gaming use. A double-CD set of remixes, demos, and instrumentals titled The Beta Cessions appeared in 2004.

Klayton founded the independent FiXT Music label in 2006, which thereafter handled all his releases as well as those of additional artists. While developing Celldweller's second full-length, Wish Upon a Blackstar, he introduced the Take It and Break It fan-remix contest, yielding multiple volumes of remix collections issued on FiXT. An instrumental project aimed at media licensing, Soundtrack for the Voices in My Head, Vol. 1, surfaced in 2008. From 2009 onward Klayton issued Wish Upon a Blackstar material digitally in paired “chapters,” and he simultaneously began Soundtrack for the Voices in My Head, Vol. 2, releasing its opening chapter in 2010. The remix collection The Complete Cellout, Vol. 1 followed in 2011. Both Wish Upon a Blackstar and Soundtrack for the Voices in My Head, Vol. 2 received complete editions in 2012, accompanied by the concert document Live Upon a Blackstar, also issued on Blu-ray/DVD; by then Celldweller's style had absorbed dubstep elements and earned the description “metalstep.”

A tenth-anniversary deluxe reissue of the debut appeared in 2013, after which Klayton turned to End of an Empire and Soundtrack for the Voices in My Head, Vol. 3. The first two chapters of End of an Empire, each a full-length set containing remixes and instrumentals, emerged in 2014 alongside the compilation Transmissions, Vol. 1. The chart-topping third chapter arrived in 2015 with Transmissions, Vol. 2. In 2016 Celldweller collaborated with video-game composer Atlas Plug on the soundtrack for Killer Instinct: Season Three, a revival of the 1990s fighting game, while Space and Time (Expansion), a remix collection drawn from the 2012 album, also appeared. Offworld, the seventh official LP, was released in 2017; it emphasized emotional songwriting over aggressive sonics and reflected shoegaze and dream-pop influences. Remixed Upon a Blackstar followed in 2018, and the studio album Satellites appeared in 2019.