Rachel Frothingham
Rachel Frothingham left the character-rich world of rare books to join rightround, where characters abound. Rachel is the office guru-ina as well as doing promotions, a smattering of project management, and trying to keep everyone in line. Her lifelong love of music began in the cradle and solidified through extended exposure to the Beatles, the Moody Blues, and other fine artists of the sixties and seventies. Hit by new wave in high school, Rachel is still scarred from years of hair-ratting, and hasn't yet been able to add significant color to her wardrobe. Rachel is consistently excited and delighted by the availability of fresh new music — some of which she gets to see as part of her other job at San Francisco's famed Fillmore and Warfield theaters. She bows gratefully to musicians everywhere.

Dave Llopis
Dave was in a band once...a high school band...a high school marching band. Other than that, he spent his formative years hacking on his TRS-80 Model III and solving his friends' Rubik's Cubes. He used to listen to total crap like the Eagles and Chicago, until one day he was saved by a Weird Al Yankovic special on MTV. That day, Dave was introduced to the Talking Heads, They Might Be Giants, and the Art of Noise, and he was born again. Musically, anyway. He's still geeking out on computers though. In fact, he programmed this website.

Annette Loudon
Once upon a time there was an Australian girl who fancied working in the music industry and imagined a beautiful life immersed in new music. One music management seminar later, she was cured of such foolishness. While writing music reviews for the University of Wollongong newspaper back in 1992, she developed an unhealthy addiction to the Internet. Conveniently finding herself in San Francisco in the early days of the web, Annette helped found Construct, one of the first web design companies. Working as a lead designer on projects for clients such as Sony, SGI, Netscape, and Macromedia gave Annette the opportunity to play with a mixed bag of web technologies, including HTML, VRML, Flash, and Director. Since leaving Construct in 2000, Annette has worked for Youssou N'Dour and set up online music projects twinklepop and songpod.com.au. Despite persistent protests from her cat, Annette's twin infatuations with music and the net show no signs of abating.

Elise Malmberg
Elise Malmberg has been involved in music and media for more than 20 years. She has worked in independent record distribution, in magazine publishing, and as a marketing director for high-tech and audio industry companies. In addition to writing and editing music and audio articles, Elise composes music for films, animation, installations, and ads. She has recorded and produced five CDs under various names, and is co-creator of fictional independent label Clubbo Records.

Merin McDonell
Piano lessons by cruel nuns in grammar school cut Merin's musical career short. However, she managed to channel that creative impulse into graphic design, and has done work for a diverse group of clients, including Soma FM, NASA Ames Research Center, OQO, McKinsey & Company, and of course, rightround! With her love of music, she is an excellent audience member, and totally addicted to Internet radio.

Elise Nordling
Most companies aren't lucky enough to have one Elise, let alone a stereo pair. Elise Nordling combines formidable coding and CSS skills with an encyclopedic knowledge of indie music. As an internationally known DJ for Internet radio pioneer Soma FM (www.somafm.com), she acts as music director of the Indie Pop Rocks! station. From her formative days as a record shop clerk, Elise went on to work for legendary online music magazine Addicted to Noise/Sonic Net, then CNET Networks, in addition to coordinating and interviewing bands for San Francisco's annual NoisePop Festival. She now brings all her experience to Rightround, where her duties include band relations, writing, and front-end coding.

Cliff Skolnick
Cliff Skolnick has more than two decades of experience in Internet servers, security, and connectivity. He was a co-founder and chief information officer of Organic Online, where he designed the network and server architecture used by such high-profile clients as Volvo, Levi's, Sybase, MCI, Netscape, Saturn, and Microsoft. Before Organic, Cliff applied his networking and software skills at Sun Microsystems in the Internet engineering group as the project lead on one of the Internet Firewall Projects. He also worked at Sun as a developer in the Clustered Systems group and as part of the Sun Professional Services organization. He is a founding member of Apache Group/Apache Software Foundation, the most popular web server used on the Internet. Cliff started DJing in 1980, and still thinks every band needs a synthesizer.

A. Tobias Tenney
Art, tech, and rock and roll! Tobias (a.k.a. T.bias) has been involved in music since fourth grade, when he began taking flute lessons, but quickly learned that Jethro Tull had taken the single opportunity in this world to rock out with the flute. He picked up bass for jazz and guitar for rock and roll in high school, while also getting core samples from the frozen lakes of design and technology. These days he sings and writes for the reunification of Specimen, white-knuckles the helm of San Francisco band Plastination, performs live bio-chaotic electronic music and remixes as 5000 Fingers, and now sits in front of a crystal ball channeling rightround's end users to help obtain the best user interface experience. And yes, sometimes during this process he talks in tongues.

Mongoose
Mongoose (a.k.a. Mothball, a.k.a. Dangle) has been an office cat at rightround since the company's inception. His responsibilities include printer supervision, server rewiring, and fax machine maintenance. He also monitors such essential corporate resources as laps and rubber bands.

Katinka
rightround's assistant office cat, Katinka (a.k.a. Lint, a.k.a. Lintball), manages the company's accounts receivable department with an iron paw. She organizes staff sing-alongs, oversees the company dress code and attendance policies, and regularly contributes her opinions on rightround's editorial direction. She will work for food.

Band Mom
Band Mom has baked magic brownies and kissed bruised egos for more musicians than she can remember. As a former band member herself, she understands how difficult it can be to get the guitarist to turn down, the bassist to tune up, and the drummer to stop using that cymbal with the rivets in the edges.

Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson wears a lot of hats, though none of them physically exist. A writer, a manager, a sometimes 9-to-5er, a music fan, "a picker, a grinner, a lover, a sinner"...that's also the first and last time she'll ever quote the Steve Miller Band. She promises. Jen lives in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, goes to too many shows, never finds as much time as she wants to read, and really needs to start wearing earplugs.

Joe Gore
Joe Gore has played guitar with Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, Tracy Chapman, DJ Shadow, Courtney Love, the Eels, and many others. He writes extensively about music and audio and has interviewed hundreds of the world's leading players, composers, producers, and technicians. Joe's latest collaboration is Clubbo, a sprawling "music fiction" project.

Rusty Hodge
Rusty Hodge is the founder, general manager, and program director of Internet radio broadcaster SomaFM. He is also the music director for SomaFM stations Groove Salad, Secret Agent, Drone Zone, Space Station Soma, and Illinois Street Lounge, contributes to Cliqhop, and instigates SomaFM's seasonally (in)appropriate Xmas in Frisko station.

Rusty got started in radio by operating a neighborhood micropower station during high school, and developed software on an Apple II for handling station playlists while managing his college radio station in the early '80s. His professional experience includes work at Los Angeles radio stations KWOW and KWIZ; developing software for broadcasters and multimedia; and founding Hodge Interactive to put radio and TV stations on the web.

Mr. Industry
Mr. Industry isn't just another suit: he also has an impressive hat collection. He's worked as a major-label recording artist, an artist manager, a composer, a producer, and an entertainment lawyer. With all these headgear options, it's a pity he has no head.

Dana Jae
Dana Jae (Labrecque)'s career as an audio engineer spans 22 years. Primarily a live sound engineer, she also works in sound for film and video in both production and post, and was a partner for five years with APG Records/Studios, an independent record label and recording studio in San Francisco. dcj Productions, her live sound company since 1989, continues to provide audio services to the Bay Area community. Dana is a part-time faculty member at City College of San Francisco in the Broadcast Electronics Media Arts department, where she has taught courses in basic audio production, digital audio production (featuring Pro Tools) and sound for video since 2001. She also teaches a class in sound for video at Globe Recording Institute in San Francisco, and previously taught sound design, audio for animation, and computer applications at the Art Institute of California-San Francisco.

Derek Koch
The Action Man, a.k.a. "Derek" (pictured jumping) is a storied band member. After years studying music in the hills of Yendor with the people known as the Yeti, he made the long journey to Chicago to ply his trade. There, and later in New York, he played the circuit and recorded with such phenoms (that may be hyperbole) as the Ursulines, Linus, and URT. At that time, he was famous for taking all the band's drink tickets and using them for his own evil ends. He now composes and records music for independent release and for independent films.

Ken M
Ken M has lived in Tokyo for more than a dozen years, and has been obsessed with Japanese indie music for most of that time. He writes a blog called Japan Live that talks about local shows, new albums, music scene trends, and other matters that pop into his head as he commutes between record stores and live houses. Ken also runs an Internet radio station named Japan Live Radio that features the best new indie music out of Japan as well as old favorites by groups such as advantage Lucy, Spangle call Lilli line, Pizzicato Five, and Macdonald Duck Eclair. Originally from Los Angeles, Ken has an office job by day, but at night is most often sighted at Tokyo music hot-spots like Shimokitazawa, Shinjuku, and Shibuya, in various degrees of intoxication.

The Pop Mechanic
With a graduate degree in composition, two decades of experience writing about music, and extensive credits as a producer, songwriter, and session musician for bands you've actually heard of, the Pop Mechanic has learned that it's more fun to be opinionated than respectful about music. Despite the thick callus of cynicism he's built up through years of music-business labor, he still gets excited when he hears a really good song.

Kim Roche
Kim Roche had a dot-com job for about six months in 1999. They gave her a very nice chair, and there were free bagels every Friday, but she couldn't handle sitting still for forty hours a week. She is now an Austin based dog trainer and musician. Once a week she manages to halt her whirlwind of activity long enough to sit down and write for rightround.com.

Andrew Rose
Andrew Rose is from Montreal, but he is not in a band. He remembers a time when MySpace was the sketchy Friendster and Canada was the laughingstock of the music world. He spends most of his time working for Secret City Records, helping present the Pop Montreal Festival and hosting its biweekly podcast, and blogging about music as redemptive mythology. Maybe he should just be in a band. It would probably help with his shameless name-dropping problem.

Julie Schuchard
Julie Schuchard is a San Francisco-based photographer. She has done work for many local and national musical artists, as well as utilizing her shutter skills on behalf of San Francisco music institutions Noise Pop Industries and Soma FM. You may also have seen her pictures grace the pages of rightround. Julie extends her passion for music and poetry through her regular "featured lyrics" posts on rightround. When she doesn't have her head behind the lens of a camera, she's off spending time on her orphaned llama ranch in Montana.

Rich Wells
Having completed stints as a staff editor at Electronic Musician magazine and Dolby Laboratories, Rich Wells was amused by the notion of becoming a freelance editor and building a recording studio in Portland, Oregon. He can usually be found in the windowless box that is his workplace, earning his keep in front of his many aging computers. Mr. Wells has recorded a variety of bands, and conjures his own fascinating, wonderful, compelling "music" when time and circumstance permit. Once in a while he'll do some nutty thing like build an all-tube Theremin or modify a junker electric organ into a guitar amp. Mr. Wells executes these activities under the auspices of the umbrella organization known as the Supreme Reality.