Ming Ming is the musical alias of John Mingsley. Born and raised in southwest Virginia, he began playing piano at the age of six, and at the age of ten, picked up the cello. Upon receiving a broken drum machine from a friend’s older brother, as well as pirated copies of Max/ MSP and Cool Edit, he started obsessively making complicated electronic versions of the songs he played in his middle school orchestra.

Minglsey relocated to Boston, Massachusetts in 2007 to attend Berklee for cello. However, he soon grew displeased with the lackadaisical attitudes of his peers toward classical and experimental music and transferred to Massachusetts College of Art to study film. It was here he experimented with different methods of hand-processing 16mm and 8mm film negatives, a skill he applied to analog recording techniques; dumping to reel-to-reel tape and then cutting it and then re-recording and then cutting, ad infinitum, as well as creating drum sounds with precisely measured perforations to the tape.

It was then he started forming his signature blend of broken and beat up drum machines, analog synthesis and recording techniques, and a cinematic approach to music. In August 2009, he played his first show in the Boston area at Weirdstock festival and a demo for Lefse subsidiary Waaga Records was passed around some blogs, leading to a legendary ecstacy-fueled Halloween show in a mansion with Fuck Buttons and Growing.

His first album, Ultrameta OK came out in the summer of 2011.

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