Eat Static

Eat Static is Merv Pepler, an electronic music project from England, UK formed in 1990. Joie Hinton left the group in February 2008 after 18 years to spend more time with his family. Merv Pepler and Joie Hinton met as drummer and keyboard player (respectively) for the Ozric Tentacles, a long-standing psychedelic "space-rock" band from Somerset. Although the Ozrics incorporated elements of electronic music, Pepler and Hinton were drawn towards the rave-oriented dance music. In 1988 they collaborated on a project under the name of Wooden Baby which hinted at early rave and techno sounds as well as numerous other styles, and by 1990, the project had evolved in to Eat Static. Pepler explained: "There we were in Ozrics doing all this technically impressive, weird music with mad timings, and getting really involved with it, and this experiment that became Eat Static was a good excuse to ignore all that, get the synths out, and be as stupid as we could!" The duo toured in parallel with the Ozric Tentacles for several years until 1994, when they left the band to pursue Eat Static full-time. Pepler and Hinton are often joined in the studio by Eat Static's invisible third member Steve Everitt. Pepler is featured on the 2006 Ozric Tentacles album 'The Floor's Too Far Away', playing percussion on the track 'Armchair Journey'. Their first album release, Abduction, immediately established the extra-terrestrial/U.F.O. obsession which is a running motif in their samples, track and album titles, and release artwork.