David Blue began writing about antique agricultural equipment in grade 1 and quickly moved on to musings on the automotive industry, aviation, and the history of the two in America. As a pre-teen, early ownership of a first generation iPhone pretentiously inspired a departure from these subjects entirely in order to blog about technology on a Blogger site and upload vapid, cringey tech videos on an accompanying YouTube channel. (Both have thankfully been lost to time.) At 16, another blog and YouTube channel followed, documenting experiences as a student pilot and building video editing as a skillset.
In high school, adolescent rebellion came in the form of Drywall — a “counter-counter culture” music project and “movement” that served as a release valve for angst and a vain obsession with polish, fostered a new pursuit in audio production and hardware electronics, and continued opportunities to work with video. The original Twitter and online community discovered during this time would later become a founding pillar of Extratone.
David returned to writing and filming about cars after graduating with a weekly column for Speedmonkey and the Drywall automotive video series Honk. With regular help from friends, Drywall content peaked in Drycast, the weekly audio podcast that received most of the energy throughout 2015. It has since been absorbed into the Extratone brand (and intermittently revived), along with the original Drywall movies (http://bit.ly/dryfilms), including the ambitious but discontinued Children of the Corn 30.
After a short, re-orienting sabbatical from a byline, David launched Extratone in Spring 2016 in the interest of consolidating and unifying a vast amount of revolutionary but often-marginalized voices within a network of visual artists, musicians, engineers, and friends amassed throughout young adulthood, and continues to obsessively pursue new culture and arguments from within the context of the platform and its community.
David grew up restoring tractors on a Missouri farm instead of making friends and embarked briefly upon a professional calling (car journalism) as a young adult before a personal loss compelled a stop at 21, turning down a dream job offer and launching a media company dedicated to celebrating an online community of exceptionally original creative people (electronic musicians, largely).
After nearly five years, David learned more about digital media, listening, leadership, the web, and personal limits than expected, and failed to accomplish the original goals.
David has spent the time since working as a freelance office administrator for small, mostly out-of-home mental health private practices and studying the history of the web for the sake of better insight as a technology writer.
Ultimately, David is compelled to seek out and celebrate truly innovative and original culture.
David Blue is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Extratone and the originator of Drywall, the counter-counterculture from which it formed. The work has thus far been defined by a chronologically-inappropriate use of the phrase good morning.
Hello!
I’m David Blue and little is left of day-to-day life apart from an online magazine and community called Extratone (http://extratone.com/about). They’re the best bunch. Some are here; more are coming. Words and their storytelling are extraordinarily significant, though facility with either is not strong in the academic sense. There used to be humor, but now there is sincerity.
We strive to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant contemporary discourse, editorially, and further the newborn movement sustaining inclutterable and substantial storytelling in digital media.
Our audience and networks overlap online consistently in evermore intricate relationships. We are interested in — and most interesting to — a massive global community of musicians, artists, designers, photographers, and software developers that has remained inquantifiable except by these relationships for its ten year lifespan. In their interest, our brand was created to unify them, and our platform exists to enable them to better distribute content and ideas between their networks.
Simultaneously, we work to bring their incorruptibly innovative output to the attention of a world that is troublingly obsessed with stale platitudes, cliches, and patterns of expression.