A longtime stalwart of the Baltimore underground scene, Craig Crouse is best known as a’phreaq, his longest running project, and has a deep history in industrial music, wave, techno and more in various projects along the way. A producer since 2000, his earliest steps involved DJing in the DMV area industrial scene and early idm/breakcore productions as frak, transitioning to live visuals as Metaphreaq & hosting events for laptop artists in B’more. The late 2000s & very early 2010s were a tough time for harder, darker sounds, so Crouse rode the transition with associations with the Better on Foot and the Denver/Baltimore/NYC Make Mistakes crews/labels, playing strains of the then-current minimal techno and house sounds. By 2012 things had transitioned yet again and A’phreaq was opening for Voices from the Lake in DC and launching the Vague Output event series, a proper foray into techno and industrial brutalism that shook its way up the coast and into Brooklyn via Bossa Nova Civic Club, also landing him at Okeechobee Festival in Florida. 2019 saw the launch of his current Unfold series, a bold foray to weather the storm of rave juvenilia in techno, which has hosted luminaries like Clarissa Kimkii, Maedon, Aaron J, and many more.