Emperor X

Chad R. Matheny has been making music since 1998, often under the name Emperor X. A former STEM educator and physics graduate student, Matheny paused academic work and spent much of the past two decades crossing the world on buses and bullet trains to perform hundreds of concerts or compose in situ at locations ranging from a symphony hall in Portugal to the basement of a garden supply shop in Pittsburgh to an abandoned trade fair dome in northern Lebanon. He often tours alone with a guitar and synth, but sometime shares bills with fellow travelers including The Hotelier, The World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, and most recently AJJ and Xiu Xiu. To date he has released eleven albums and more than a dozen odd-format tour-only EPs and one-off singles. Music from some of these recordings appears in the soundtrack of the of the 2014 Warner Bros. film Veronica Mars and has been featured on national radio outlets including Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg in Germany and National Public Radio (three times) in the United States.