Heliosphere is Minneapolis-based group that combines aggressive beats and club-worthy synths with an always impressive live performance to produce the Twin Cities' premiere Industrial/EBM act. Heliosphere members are William Bates, Andrew Davies, and Rob Ziarkowski. William Bates: Lead Vocals, Writer, Programmer, Engineer Starting as a young child in small town Wisconsin, Bates parents gave him lessons in organ and acoustic guitar. It didn’t take long for his desire for low end to develop and drove him to ask for a bass guitar. That year (age 14) his parents gave him one for Christmas. Messing around with various garage bands in high school until he moved to Milwaukee and delved into the underground experimental scene that overflowed from Chicago. He was playing live shows regularly with a few different bands. Bates moved to Minneapolis from Milwaukee after the popular local band he was in; Embassy broke up. Spending a few years writing commercial music that appeared on CNN and ESPN featuring Michael Jordan, John Elway, Toro, and Coca Cola; he played in several bands, and wrote music for the performance art troupe Vox Medusa. After Vox Medusa parted ways Bates changed his life dramatically and gave up writing commercially and moved to Mexico for a while. There he remembered his childhood dreams and reacquainted himself with his love for philosophy and returned to Minneapolis determined to get things right this time and founded Heliosphere. Andrew Davies: Keyboards, back-up vocals, writer, programmer, web designer With a background in music composition, Davies love for music started at the age of 4 when he began piano lessons. Davies parents like Bates encouraged him to play instruments through out his school age years. During this time Davies played a wide range of instruments over the years; including, saxophone, trumpet, drums, bells, piano, and keyboards. His love for music continued into college where he discovered techno music was influenced heavily by it. For several years, Davies played in the popular Madison, Wisconsin band “State Four.” When the group subsequently moved to Minneapolis and broke up, he responded to an ad Bates had placed in a local publication in which he said he was looking for a keyboardist with influences ranging from Covenant, Seabound, and Icon of Coil. “Within 20 seconds of listening to a song he’d put together I knew I wanted in,” Davies says. Rob Zairkowski: keyboards, back up vocals, writing Before finding his calling behind the keyboards he had been playing electric, acoustic, and bass guitars for about five years with six months of guitar lessons. His love of industrial/electronic music lead him to use whatever effects he could to make his instruments sound like anything other than a guitar. Buying and selling gear on the early years of eBay he built a collection of synths and started writing music in 1997. As a self-proclaimed audiophile, he studied and learned to write music on his own. Rob performs live keyboards with the band and backing vocals to provide a higher quality sound for stage performance. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.