Draven: Two Cents is an evolution of reviews that I have done over the past ten plus years. To give you the proper understanding to what Two Cents is, I am going to give you a brief history lesson on the idea behind this and perhaps it will also show you how this "Review" section is truly different than that of the traditional reviews.

I have worked for magazines as a side project for over a decade. Most of it has come in the form of interviews and reviews. I did this for a number of local magazines and a video-zine. All of these were short lived, but I was able to thrive as I seem to have a knack in contacting the right people and have never had a fear of making an idiot of myself. It is a rare family trait that in this respect reaped rewards.

The video-zine was meant to take the interviewing to a new level with having other people give their input (typically people off the street). The problem with this is that many of the banbs and their albums were unknown to many of the normal people. This complication made it where either a lot more time was spent finding the right people or having people on hand to give input. This resulted in many of the same perspectives that were common to certain social circles and didn't give any true insights. It also was a challenge in that people tend to be less open or too open when a camera is on them.

I stopped reviewing albums until my time in Europe. It seemed that people in Europe and Russia placed a lot of value on my insights and that led to many reviews that I did one websites and also on some of the radio stations I was DJing on. That, too posed a problem as the first station I ever did on air was in Sweden. They didn't want English context, I couldn't speak Swedish, and translators butcher written material.

At this point most people may give up. When I started on one of the bigger US stations I started reviewing albums again. The first was one of the newer albums by Information Society. Let me start off by saying that they are a band that is truly professional and a class act. They gave me tons of good information and were very insightful to the creation of the album. It also gave me a unique perspective on the meaning to some of the music and why they used a variety of female vocalists. This also was where I started my "cocktails" with songs and albums. It was original and a lot of fun to present. They reviews were a hit, but still had the same mundane elements that a typical review presented.

We now jump further ahead. With DJ-Draven, I did Draven's Two Cents. This was a way to give exposure to a lot of the music that I have been receiving from members of the music world and to show that the "norm" even in EBM, TBM, Agrotech, Goth, Industrial, and the other genres were not all that was out there. I did a ton of these reviews as it was a good reason to listen to more music and give content to the site. What made Draven's Two Cents so different was that it was meant to be a review of one friend to another, not a "professional" to the public. This made the reviews more personal and allowed me to be more unorthodox with the presentation.

Two Cents is the next step in this evolution. What you see is the personal perspectives of myself or someone else in our staff. I promise to be honest, to present many albums you have never heard of, and to make it fun.

Last note, to all the bands, distributors, and labels that send me the music I have...thank you. Two Cents, this site, and my radio shows are tributes to all of you. Without each of you and the fans that you have (or will soon have), there would be no music world. My goal, and the goal of all of us is to make the music world a bit easier to navigate.