We are ripples.

The story starts in the early 2010s. By then he'd already spent a decade in Toronto's progressive scene, behind the decks and on late-night radio. No overnight story. Just the next record.

Penner has talked about it directly, on his own show, more than once. For years he struggled with jealousy, animosity, anger, and frustration watching others around him get opportunities. He compared himself to everyone who was similar to him in a similar place in their career. When they got opportunities, the only question was why not me?

He reached a point where he just said fuck it. I'm gonna just do me. Once he let go of it, things started moving differently.

Radio Silence

JOOF Recordings · 2019

Beatport #1 · MixMag Album of the Month.

Available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Beatport.

▸Preview

150+ release credits across originals, remixes, and commissioned work, on labels like JOOF, Sudbeat, Cycles, Black Hole, Proton, and his own Slideways Music. Not a hits-and-misses arc. A discipline arc.

Radio Silence came out on JOOF in 2019. Beatport #1, MixMag Album of the Month — and then the next record.

His tracks have appeared regularly across the sets of Hernan Cattaneo, Nick Warren, and Guy J. Time in the room with them, especially Cattaneo on his Toronto stops, shaped the music as much as any studio session. Counting Sails on Sudbeat (2020) was the most recent artifact of that conversation.

Slideways Music is his own imprint, founded in 2014. Defining a sound rather than chasing one. Slideways is where everything connects: label, podcast, events, and the immersive systems work currently in development.

A room of strangers held by one record. Everyone hearing it together, in the same moment. That's what's ever mattered to him about a set. What it does to people is the work.

Two decades of doing this. A DJ set is storytelling, told in real time through other people's records. Where to begin, where to bend, where to break, where to lift. The records change every night. The arc is the part that has to come from him. He's the soundtrack to a lot of people's nights, and that's never been a small thing to him.

Slideways Sessions changed how he toured. Listeners abroad recognized the records and the voice, then asked him to play their cities. Each booking arrived through community first. The room he walked into already knew his hand. The show built the connections; the floor is where they paid out.

The floor is where the practice grounds itself. People finding each other in the music. That's the part that doesn't change.

The show ran weekly from 2015 onward, long-form progressive house. It lived on SoundCloud, with a parallel live broadcast on DI.FM for the regulars.

At its core, the show is music exploration. The mix is the artifact, and the music is the voice. The intros that open each episode set the mood and context for that week's mix. France residency summers, fatherhood, mental health, hospital scares, COVID and the slow climb back, his son's first time on stage at Eclipse Festival. Whatever's around him becomes the frame. The mix carries the rest.

The companion show. Through the lockdown years, with no spoken intros at all. In their place, long cinematic openers, abstract music, and field samples journaled month by month what was happening to the world, to relationships, to his own mental health. The story runs deep and dark across the run. The final one was the moment he realized he needed to stop. The closing line of its opener carried the recognition.

He founded True Peak Sound School in 2019. A craft school for serious producers — the kind of studio conversations he wished existed when he was coming up, in structured form. Aulart acquired it in 2022.

At Aulart he directed masterclasses and long-form interview sessions with Scott Storch, Che Pope, Rik Simpson, and Steve Lobel. Producers most readers know only from the credits on records they grew up with. What to ask. When to let them keep going. When to cut to the next thread. The interviewer is a producer too — that changes the room.

For the last several years, his day job has been sound design for VR training simulations used by skilled tradespeople in high-risk fields. They train inside the audio before they ever enter the worksite.

Every tool, every interaction, every environment has its own sound. The hum of a substation. The click of a breaker. The wind in the rafters. The ambience is what tells a worker's body the simulation is real. Get it wrong, the simulation breaks. Get it right, it disappears.

His team called him "the creative vortex." That is what he has been doing.

A decade ago, at Shok Kreative, he designed the music-driven interface for a Minority-Report-style transparent touchscreen. Gesture and touch experiences, built for the studio and for crowd deployments. The platform debuted at Microsoft Surface's launch, NAMM, Coachella and Heineken activations, and Dragon's Den.

It was the first clear signal of something he has been working toward ever since. How do you remove the distance between a person and sound? How do you build a relationship that feels intuitive, where the user is responding to something rather than operating it? Helping people create in real time is the thread that runs from the transparent screen forward.

What comes next in that line is not ready to name. The technology just keeps getting closer.

Across four nights of an invite-only private series, he built a full performance from scratch on a 20-channel speaker array. One hundred and twenty people came through the room. A ninety-minute performance, composed only for those nights. Live vocals. Piano. Ambient and foley. Sub frequencies from a single direction. Deliberate panning across the others. He spoke to the room at the beginning and asked them to let go. They sat. They lay on the floor. They closed their eyes. The audience was seated inside the sound, not in front of it.

Multichannel revealed something he hadn't considered. A major-scale phrase paired with a dissonant sub-frequency from elsewhere in the room lands somewhere different in the body. Voices, masking, misdirection. There are methods to influence a listener in ways they cannot anticipate. If they trust you, you are responsible for the experience. Philosophical, ethical, moral decisions, sitting under what looks like composition.

The questions that surfaced inside that room are still the ones he's working with.