Infatuated with sounds from an early age, Eli began hosting and engineering radio shows at his high school at 14. He went on to play in many bands, and get into recording classes before the end of high school. Upon graduating he continued to host radio shows, travel the globe DJing, recording soundscapes and libraries for personal use in music production.
This focus on soundscapes and recording brought Eli into the realization that he could combine two things he highly enjoyed - sound and video games. He went back to school for audio and within a year was working at Shiny Entertainment in Newport Beach on The Golden Compass game. He become focused on the integration and technical aspects of making sound work in the game sphere, and has taken on both the creative and technical rolls on all of his projects since. The studio merged with The Collective and became Double Helix games, and Eli was part of the team that made Silent Hill: Homecoming. After working on early versions of GI Joe:The Rise of Cobra, and what became The Green Lantern, Eli headed back to Canada to work for Artificial Mind and Movement (A2M).
At A2M Eli helped to gut the faltering project Wet, and replace all the existing audio to craft a new audio aesthetic for the game. This included working on a new sound track featuring action music including a wide variety of Psychobilly and Rockbillly bands discovered through internet searches, and amazing incidental music from Brian Lebarton (Composer and arranger for artists such as Feist and Beck). The game was nominated for Best Audio at the Canadian Video Game Awards in 2009. Eli then went on to work on Naughty Bear, and MySims Sky Heros at A2M.
Then he got the call to work as the Senior Technical Sound Designer on Thief 4 at the newly formed Eidos Montreal. Working with the overseas Audio Director Eli took on most roles of the audio department, including all asset management, working with all the other teams and the one dedicated audio programmer to create new features with Wwise and Unreal, and create the sonic persona of this game that relies so heavily on audio. For over 2.5 years Eli worked tirelessly to craft a game that would blow minds with how stealth could be played with and against an environment.
Now Eli is working from a studio in the beautiful Gulf Islands of BC, crafting audio and music for games, commercials, and video projects. More recent game projects include Dreamsreach, Underworld Ascendant, We Happy Few, Sonic Boom: The Rise of Lyric, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Legends, Mandragora, and Pinball Maniacs. He has extensive knowledge of working with Unreal, Unity, WWise, FMOD, Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Reaper, Vegas, and more.
In this time Eli also had a growing DJ career under the alias Eliazar - and the production/event company he founded named Speakeasy Electro Swing. He was rated in the top 5 DJs in Montreal in 2012 in the Camuz readers poll, and has performed all over the planet. Albums were also released with a live electronic band named Stab Ability, and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. He is also running the Speakeasy Electro Swing team and record label with musical events in Montreal, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Oslo, Mexico City, and Austin. You can have a listen to his compilations of Vintage Remix music here.
Eli lives, eats and breathes sound. If anything is important to him, it is finding the right sound, the right song, the right sonic signature for a project, and finding a way to relate that to a client's needs. Having the means to live and work in the US or Canada has helped this nomad to spread his sound to all corner of the globe, and keeps looking for new ways to do just that.