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Nikki Shapiro has been recording since 1999, when he was bass player/vocalist for Athens,
Georgia-based experimental rock band Rubber Experiment. The band was perhaps best summed up by Marc Pilvinsky of the The Flagpole,
who characterized them as a group "utilizing samplers, drum machines, a moog, saxophone, drums, percussion, guitar, and the
ever-present foundation of maestro Nikki Shapiro's rocksteady bass." Because experiments can only last so long, Rubber Experiment
broke up in 2000. Call them purists.
In 2000, Shapiro moved to Raleigh, North Carolina because as an eleven-year-old,
he was impressed by the Poetry in Motion that was the 1983 NCSU National Championship Wolfpack men's basketball team. Though
former Rubber Experiment bandmates did not share Shapiro's insatiable appetite for collegiate athletics of every sport, he
convinced two of them to move to North Carolina's capital and start math rock sensation Matter Eater. While working with Matter
Eater (again as bassist/vocalist) and local digital videographers on soundtracks and gallery openings, Shapiro involved himself
in four-track production, cranking out a series of one-man-band songs both melancholy and obtuse. Before long, however, he
grew frustrated with what he has described as a "masturbatory scene of incestuous pseudo-artist getting sticky over maybe-art."
It was in 2001 that he saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and was impressed by Space Astronaut Dave's willingness to venture
after the giant space fetus all alone. So Shapiro went solo. He has trimmed away the bollocks of odd-measure stop-and-go seventeen
minute "songs" and surrendered himself to the long-latent influences of Morrissey, Elton John, and Burt Bacharach. Magically
mutating his bass into a keyboard overnight, Shapiro told Raleigh he "started taking piano serious" and has since played a
series of shows performing songs from his album originally titled The Young Adult. No stranger to the ladies any longer, Shapiro
has used his croonings on lost love and unwanted relationships to glean the falsified phone number of many a local indie rocker
who finds his songs pretty. He hopes everyone thinks he's pretty, even though he cannot reiterate enough that he "ain't no
gay."
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