Maharadja Sweets
is a lifelong home recording enthusiast, recording his first album at the age of 10 in 1981.
As a teenager on Long Island in the mid-to-late eighties, he
submitted early albums to WFMU's seminal Lo-Fi radio show, where his music was played a number of times.
In the
ensuing decades he sweated out his artistic muse mostly in isolation, recording trunk loads of material.
Sweets crossed paths with the underground cassette
world of the 2010's when he met Seth of Orange Milk Records (which Rolling Stone has called "the world's most vital cassette
label") at an
open mic in Brooklyn.
In 2012, Orange
Milk released Sweets' seminal "Engines of Joy" album to critical acclaim, Impose Magazine calling it "a tape
of mysterious honesty; purely experimental, forward thinking, disturbing and beautiful, showcasing a raw, personal and
mystical vision."
Sweets followed
it up with the epic low-tech space opera "In An Orange Milky Way," which Lars Gotrich of NPR named one of the
best 25 cassette albums of 2012.
Since
then, he has released numerous creative and adventurous albums in a variety of genres.
His work has been featured in an exhibit at New York Public Library
of the Performing Arts, and been lauded by such publications as Wire, Tiny Mix Tapes, and National Geographic Indonesia.
