Stevie J Jones, who releases music as an NFT artist under the alias 1x1, is a multi-instrumentalist, producer and self-described code junkie from Bangor, Northern Ireland. Before working in NFTs he built a career as a touring and session guitarist, playing with Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance, Brian Eno, AIR, Imogen Heap and others, while running a parallel career as a web developer.
Jones started playing guitar seriously at 14, and his teenage band Spontaneous Dog won the UK's Panasonic Audio Rock School competition in 1991. He studied Japanese at Edinburgh University, spending a year living in Japan, before touring the world as lead guitarist for Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance. Perry later sang on Higher Deeper, a track from Jones's debut solo album Angels In Drag. He went on to record and tour with artists including Imogen Heap, playing guitar on her 2019 Mycelia tour. After moving to London in 2000 he also built a parallel career as a web developer, inspired by the Flash work of Yugo Nakamura.
He took the alias 1x1 to separate his music practice from his coding work, though the two eventually merged into one. With his childhood friend Jules Maxwell, also from Bangor, he began Fragments from The Cross in October 2020, a collaborative series of daily improvisations recorded in their shared workspace in southeast London and planned as a five-volume collection. In early 2021 he released Fragments from The Cross, Vol. 1 on Hic et Nunc, hacking a single SVG file into a functioning 20-track music player, among the platform's first HTML-based NFTs. Producing Volume 2 required working with the Hic et Nunc team to route audio files through external IPFS servers around the platform's file-size limit. Volume 3 was recorded partly remotely during a period of family illness, with guest guitarist Leo Abrahams appearing on several tracks.
He releases work exclusively on Hic et Nunc and Tezos, citing the environmental impact of proof-of-work blockchains as his reason for avoiding Ethereum.Fellow artist Nicolas Sassoon named 1x1 among the artists he recommended following.
