Ronvid Breaks His Own Music Theory on 'My Strange Pet'

Ron Chatham juggles multiple names depending on what he is making, cutting country and blues as Ron Chatham, synth pop as CircuitHaus, and comedy under CPAP. Under his Ronvid moniker, 'My Strange Pet' started as a deliberate attempt to mess with his own background in music theory. Working inside Korg Gadget at 128 BPM, he took a patterned drum beat, sliced up a synth sequence, and dropped chunks into random intervals with zero key center, eventually forcing himself to track down each odd pitch change just to match his baseline back to it.

He links the rebellious mindset to Frank Zappa playing a bicycle on the Steve Allen Show, not for the timbre, but for the sheer disregard of standard rules. The odd thing is how well it holds together: instead of turning into unlistenable noise, the track ends up bouncing like the victory screen on an old Nintendo cartridge, keeping an upbeat pulse that you can actually dance to.