Alexander Perls Official Website
This exceptionally basic website is the homepage of Alexander "Sandy" Perls Rousmaniere, an entrepreneur, web application developer, former songwriter, and reasonably fun guy based in Los Angeles. Perls has started a quite a few unsusual artistic and business enterprises over the years, most of which failed.
Here are some of the things that didn't fail:
Selected projects
Ezvid Inc. is a software development firm established in 2009. Ezvid's flagship product for Microsoft Windows, a video editor and screen recorder, has been downloaded over twenty-five million times since release, to make millions of YouTube videos, some of which are half-decent. Ezvid is state-of-the art, circa 2012, and remains a standing relic of that mythic era.
Speedwrite is a slightly naughty but completely legal AI-powered service which exploded onto social media in 2021 (about two years before chatGPT), and currently has hundreds of thousands of users. In short, Speedwrite allows a user to insert any English text, and output a unique, high-quality rewrite of that text. It's hugely popular in the Middle East and Asia, and other places where smart people, who aren't native English speakers, have to write complicated stuff in English.
Ezvid Wiki was built during the Internet's Wild-West period, starting in 2013, and was designed for the efficient entertainment of large numbers of slow-moving American e-commerce consumers, who at that time were docile, and could be easily approached on their native Internet grasslands. Ezvid Wiki informed the purchase of a truly enormous quantity of consumer products, well into the hundreds of millions of dollars of gross sales, through the means of an extensive and confusing series of ranking videos on YouTube, which got hundreds of millions of views between 2014 and 2021. It made too much money, so Google decided to kill it in 2021, also because it was competing with their "Google Shopping" service.
009 Sound System was music written and produced by Alexander Perls between 2009 and 2011. This music appears on about 3 million YouTube videos, with about 20 billion aggregate plays. Perls developed an unconventional but strictly legal strategy for disseminating this music on YouTube, a strategy which was shut down by Google in 2012 because it made too much money.
Aalborg Soundtracks was soundtrack music by Alexander Perls, composed in the 2009 to 2012 period, primarily while under the influence of high-quality marijuana. These soundtracks were widely uploaded to YouTube.
Buzzquote, active circa 2012 to 2013, was a nearly-incomprehensible attempt to sell auto insurance on YouTube, which weirdly had a lot of users for a while, before being shut down by Google in 2013 because it made too much money.
Current tiresome obsessions
The Lightning Network, which enables instant, permissionless, private, and secure P2P payments using Bitcoin, will be changing the world at some point in the reasonably near future. Also: Google can't shut it down.
Nostr is a decentralized social network, which can be a replacement for Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. It's just getting started, but I highly recommend you get set up with Nostr today, to see what all the fuss is about.
Fairly uninteresting biographical backstory
There is some semi-accurate info about Alexander Perls on this Wikipedia page.
Alexander Perls grew up in Massachusetts, a state mostly populated by annoying people, and attended Concord Academy, a high school for spoiled New England teens, and then spent four years at the much-maligned Oberlin College, an institution where he learned to keep his mouth shut with respect to progressive fantasies, about 25 years before everyone else had to learn to do the same thing.
In 1999-2000 Perls, following a now long-forgotten family legacy, briefly worked for Barbara Gladstone, a powerful and mean-spirited New York contemporary art dealer, before realizing that buttressing the fragile egos of the ultra-rich would be a not-so-fun way to spend the rest of his life. Also, he got fired, probably for a very good reason.
In the period 1999 to 2001, Perls and a few friends founded and briefly operated NATOarts, an arts organization which is best understood (and/or misunderstood) by referencing the NATOarts home page, the NATOarts exhibition images, and the NATOarts press clippings.
Alexander Perls is happily married to Sonia Boyajian, a beautiful woman who makes beautiful things.
Contact Alexander Perls
About that music...
During the period 1999 to 2011, Perls variously wrote, co-wrote, produced, co-produced, instrumented, sang, played guitar, and generally assisted in the creation of music, some of which you might, or might not, actually like.
A discography is below, and a somewhat more complete discography is available at Discogs.
During a brief and widely ignored avant-garde period, from 1998 to 2001, Perls was focused on pretentious electronic music for other liberal arts students, under the project names Icebreaker and Icebreaker International.
Following this disappointing foray, Perls "got serious" and tried to figure out how to make music that would appeal to the disinterested masses. To that end, most the tunes in the discography below were composed during the period 2001 to 2011, when Perls was active as a "top-line" songwriter. At his studio in New York (2001 - 2005), and then Los Angeles (2006 - 2011), he wrote songs and recorded vocalists for the benefit of European DJs and dance music producers, who, in those early days of the Internet, used to have a hard time finding decent English-language singers and songwriters for their tracks.
But things changed: Circa 2010, Perls discovered a distribution strategy through YouTube and iTunes, and then quickly gave up on this whole "dance music" thing, and instead focused on 009 Sound System, a self-indulgent and weirdly liturgical electronic-pop solo project.
Perls retired from music around 2012 when he ran out of even semi-ok new ideas.