I began drawing at age 3 and started playing guitar at 5. Although I loved drawing, by about 10 years old, the idea of being a rock guitarist took precedent over my love for visual arts. I made my way to Los Angeles at 18 and played lead guitar in a few bands and had some moderate early success. I then also became really interested in music production which took me in a slightly different direction.

By 25, I had produced some major label albums, but unfortunately I also began going down a dark road with drugs and alcohol around the same time. For a few years, I really struggled and to say it was bad is an understatement. I eventually got sober a few years later and gratefully I’m still sober to this day.

I wasn’t sure where life would lead me coming out of that, but I sort of then fell into doing music for high-end advertising. I had a pretty good run with that for about 10 years and also was involved with several feature films. During that time I also began licensing my music for a lot of film and television placements. Things were going pretty good, but somewhere along the line I lost my connection to who I was as an artist. So much of what I was doing was for someone else, it was much more service based and what I truly wanted to do creatively.

Around 2017, as I was just starting to get my skill-set really together with Orchestral composing for feature films and trailers, I suddenly had a catastrophic hearing problem. To make a long story short, I thought it was ‘game over’ for me with music. After a few months of processing this, I decided life must go on and switched over to visual arts as my main creative focus for the foreseeable future. During this period I developed my own style experimenting with painting, digital art and more recently motion and graphics.

My hearing fortunately recovered after a few years and I then found myself with both of these sides of me developing as an artist. I discovered NFTs in Clubhouse in early 2021 and became immediately enthralled. I wanted to learn everything I could and feel we are still just at the very beginning!

More About My Hearing Loss Journey

(and how I got it back!)

I live for music. Listening to it, playing it, the creation of songs, the craft of production…I love it all. Music was the thread that tied my whole life together and I never could imagine a world without it…until several years ago.

On June 10th 2017, I suddenly lost most of my hearing in my left ear and a few weeks later, my right ear followed. On top of the hearing loss, what I could hear had changed pitch by a 4th in my left ear and I lost all dynamic range. Certain frequencies would actually hurt at volumes that wouldn’t bother anyone normally, but at the same time, I had lost the majority of my hearing. It was very strange. My hearing was totally unusable for even understanding what was going on with musical progressions and I was told by doctors that if it did not start to improve within a month, it would most likely be that way for the rest of my life.

I lived about a year wearing earplugs just about everywhere and I was very isolated. Things began to change when I tried hyperbaric oxygen treatments for the first time in 2018. I did a week of successive treatments and about a month after, I noticed that my hearing had improved ever so slightly. I began going back every month or so for more treatments and it continued to seem to help, but it was getting expensive and not very practical. At the rate I was going, to make any real progress I knew I would need to do a lot more. I then got lucky and found someone selling a used chamber with an oxygen concentrator that I was able to afford, and bought it immediately. Over the next year, I estimate that I spent over 250 hours inside of it. By the fall of 2019, my hearing had returned to about 85% and most of the strange anomalies had improved dramatically.

During the period when my hearing was at it’s worst, I spent most of my time making art and building a company that I started with my family a few years earlier. As my hearing slowly started to get better, I began to make music again. I started exploring some new ideas I had for combining orchestral music with rock that I had envisioned when I couldn’t hear. A few months later, I was composing music for the official trailer of 1917.

In 1989, just after high school, I replaced Paul Gilbert as guitarist in the Los Angeles band Racer-X after being discovered by Mike Varney and featured in Guitar Player magazine the previous year. The band was selling out and packing their usual rotation of The Roxy Theatre, Troubadour, and the Country Club in Reseda, California, but years of unsuccessfully searching for a major label deal finally took its toll on the band. I attended a year of college at USC and briefly formed my own band in Los Angeles, but eventually decided to move back to San Francisco. I focused on songwriting and music production for the next few years while also attending classes at UC Berkeley.

During this time, I lived in a rehearsal space inside Rocker Rehearsal Studios in San Francisco. One of the other tenants at the time was Anton Newcombe who was just starting The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Anton lived in the space right next to me. I recorded the very first version of the band’s track ‘Straight Up & Down’ which later became the title sequence music for HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. In 1991, I met mixer Mark Needham after Mark expressed interest after hearing some of my songwriting demos. Mark helped me get a small studio space inside Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco. Needham had just engineered Chris Issak’s Wicked Game and had a studio space in Hyde Street as well. He was an early mentor to me as an engineer and mixer and I worked out of Hyde Street through 1997.

Through the mid 90’s, I recorded a number of San Francisco bands including The Brian Jonestown Massacre. I also played gutiar in the bands Lithium Milkshake and Dimebag Child. At age 25, I produced, engineered, and mixed the Grotus ‘Mass’ album on London Records/Polygram.

 In early 2003, I returned to album production, engineering and mixing for producer Tony Berg. During this period, I worked with Mellowdrone and Jon Bates (Big Black Delta), Mt. Egypt, Dawes, Blake Mills, Carla Azar of Autolux and Camilla Grey. I also had a band with Michael Fitzpatrick who later formed (Fitz & The Tantrums). By 2006, I had become more involved with pop music working with the production/songwriting team Rock Mafia as an engineer. I was a vocal producer on some of the early Miley Cyrus tracks. Other artists I worked with over the next year include Vanessa Hudgens, Sick Puppies, Aly & AJ, and The Pussycat Dolls. I also worked with Songwriter Sheppard Solomon on several tracks. In 2007, I was a producer on the Bratz movie soundtrack. Around this time, I also produced, engineered, and mixed tracks for Diane Birch and mixed Alexa Palladino‘s Exitmusic.

By about 2009, I found myself increasingly unsatisfied and burnt out working in the music business. Along with the declining perceived and monetary value of music, tightening of recording budgets and a dislike for the overall direction of where pop music was heading, I decided to take a break from music altogether for a while. Interested in learning some new skills, I began teaching myself about web design, photography, and graphic design. I didn’t stay away from music for very long though and when I came back to it over the the next two years, I focused more on creating music just for myself instead of working on the technical side for others. I also just didn’t see much point in releasing his music the way things had evolved with streaming services. I chose just to do it for myself, hoping that someday there would be a better way to share it with the world.

Around this same time, my mom Julie Arvan, who had previously been a Vice-President of Gymboree, had been working on a design for a new type of baby carrier. Inspired by yoga wear, she invented the Nesting Days skin-to-skin newborn carrier. I used my web and graphic design skills to make the website and we began selling the product online. Over the next two years, Nesting Days grew and I handled the social media, branding, and advertising. Nesting Days received their first patent in 2014. As Nesting Days began to grow even more, I was increasingly becoming involved in the business.

On June 10th 2017, I suddenly lost about 70% of my hearing in my left ear and a few weeks later, my right ear followed. This was the beginning of a radically different journey than I ever thought might be in my future and brings us up to date with the intro on this page. The experience proved to have silver linings that I could also not foresee. If not for my hearing loss, I most likely would not have ever delved as intensively into visual art and the business.

In late 2017, I joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization Accelerator program. The EO Accelerator program is a learning program for entrepreneurs who want to grow their business to pass the $1M mark through direct learning from mentors and affords members the unique experience of learning from and connecting with the world’s most influential entrepreneurs. I struggled with my hearing and communicating initially, but learned to adapt. It was difficult, but I had no choice and just tried to make the best of it. Looking back now from a few years later, with my hearing completely recovered, I view the experience as actually enriching my life.

– Chris