The Disco Biscuits are an American jam band from Philadelphia. The band consists of Allen Aucoin (drums), Marc "Brownie" Brownstein (bass guitar, vocals), Jon "The Barber" Gutwillig (guitar, vocals), and Aron Magner (keyboards, synths, vocals). The band incorporates elements from a variety of musical genres with a base of electronic and rock. Their style has been described as trance fusion. History The Disco Biscuits formed in 1995 at the University of Pennsylvania. Brownstein, Gutwillig, Magner, and the original drummer, Samuel "Sammy" Altman, shared an affinity for psychedelic rock, electronic music, soul, blues, jazz and classical music. Their shared interests led them to develop and perfect a distinctive style of live electronic music that has come to be called 'trance fusion'. The term references the band's choice to incorporate elements of trance music - specifically the driving, rhythmically repetitive drum beats and melodic sections that repeat and evolve over time - into the instrumentation and conventions of a live jam-band where guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums play structured songs with sections for exploratory improvisation. The band developed and honed their style while playing at bars and fraternity-house shows in the Philadelphia area in the mid-1990s. Bassist Marc Brownstein credits the improvisational creativity demonstrated by the jam-band Phish during the 95-97 tours as a particular inspiration for the Disco Biscuits' unique sound. He recognized that improvisation-inclined bands (largely inspired by Phish and the Grateful Dead) needed to differentiate their sound in meaningful ways in order to stand out in the underground mid-to-late-1990s live music scene, and the Biscuits members' interest in electronic music was an element that was ripe for further exploration. The band received particular acclaim from fans for the thoughtful setlist compositions mixed with exploratory improvisation demonstrated during their 1999 tours. This era (sometimes referred to as 'the nine-nine' by Disco Biscuits fans) featured energetic musical improvisation that explored new musical styles while still remaining listenable to a general jam-band audience. The first stirrings of the trance-fusion sound arose during early shows played by the band, which incorporated the Roland_JP-8000, an analog-modeling synthesizer (which also features prominently in the track Sandstorm_(instrumental) by Finnish electronic artist Darude) whose sounds gave a distinctly electronic flavor to jams that were otherwise standard rock-and-blues Phish-inspired improvisations. The unofficial first show incorporating the JP-8000 as played by keyboardist Aron Magner into the band's sound was the Halloween, 1997 set at the Phi Kappa Gamma fraternity