As a composer and musician, Ivan Reese has never formally studied music, nor has any evident musical talent. His compositions have been hailed as "frustrating", his performances "too ambitious". A common reaction to his music is a scrunching of the face muscles, followed by quizzical looks and questions too vague to be worth asking. As as band leader, Ivan Reese has instilled in many the great desire to quit outright. Under his leadership, no band has made it past their second performance. As a recording artist, he has recorded enough music to ensure even those of the most insatiably avant pallets feel they've heard enough.

In his own pompous words:

I believe foremost that I am a composer as opposed to a musician, though I fulfill both functions in many of my projects. I prefer to think in terms of the raw elements of sound, as opposed to the terms of music or a particular fashion of songwriting. When writing I usually start with a feeling, or something that invokes a feeling - a photograph, a drawing, an old memory of a long-past event. I'll work from the place of feeling to a place of sound contexts, fitting together different textures and timbers in my mind. I'll do studies, little throwaway recordings or sketches, to work out ideas in the domain of sound. I'll try to feel for a rhythm or tone-cluster that would propel the feeling, which I then complement with the other. I settle on a specific collection of motives, a melody if you will, at the very end of the process.

Ivan Reese first earned the ire of many peers by deciding to become a professional artist. Not 3 months from the beginning of his first semester, Ivan dropped out of art school. Since that seminal retreat he has made several failed attempts to produce works of film both short and feature-length, establish himself as an animator (despite having released no animations), and collaborate with other artists on works in sundry mediums. It is hardly worth confirming forgone conclusion that none of this dabbling has born any fruit.

Resigning himself to failure as an artist, Ivan Reese momentarily flirted with the ill-conceived enterprise of becoming a computer programmer. It was his belief that his fascination with mathematics would manifest well in the field of computation, despite nearly having failed high-school calculus and showing no grasp of even the most rudimentary notions. The outcome was to be inevitable - after a mere year at University, having stochastically shuffled through three degree programs before settling on Computer Science, he dropped out again.

A most ineligible bachelor, Ivan is completely without romantic prospects or potential. He has been likened to a bull in a china shop, with respect to his lack of empathy. A former partner's final resort was to chase him out of their house with a cast iron frying pan. It is recommended that, in spite of leading scientific research and the certain paradoxes at play, anyone finding themselves wooed by his distasteful charms be reminded of the apophthegm, "There are plenty more fish in the sea."