Northern California native Justin Beck’ s pursuit of music began in earnest as a student of Alto Saxophone under the excellent and peerless Ari Camarota. After seven years of saxophone training and a very brief punk guitar period Justin discovered the world of electronic instrumentation and the dance/electronic scene. This direction was furthered at the Department of MIDI Music chaired by musician Michel Brandeburg at the Santa Rosa Junior College in Sonoma County California. In this class Justin met future collaborator Jordan Cadogan and together they would form the core of electronica group BioUtopia which has recorded and performed live in the Bay Area under several guises for almost ten years. Justin holds a certificate in Recording Engineering from the Grammy winning Prairie Sun Studio’s Recording School and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications Studies and Astronomy from Sonoma State University as well as a German language Spracktprogram Zertificate from the University of Tuebingen in Germany where he also studied Astrophysics and founded a small but short lived electronic music program. Justin held a recording contract as an artist and as a producer with San Francisco’s Silent Records in the 1990’s where he completed the Alaura and Burning Sea ambient electronica projects. In New York Justin worked as a DJ at Swift’s and Puk Faire and worked as a sound and lighting technician at the world-renowned Performance Space 122, a space that helped to give rise to the careers of the likes of Laurie Anderson, Spaulding Grey and Eric Bogasian. At PS 122 Justin worked on performances for British Comedy duo The Right Size, cutting-edge Dutch performance group Hollandia, PS122 founder and N.E.A. Four activist Tim Miller, the Julia Mendel performance group, “post-dramatic” playwright Richard Maxwell and Karen Finley among many others. In 2001 Justin returned to the Bay Area to become an executive board member and head of audio development for Miratis, a multimedia software company. In 2003 Justin founded Sanctioned Records, an extremely independent record label devoted to electronic and underground music in the post-90’s dance music era. There have been several very limited releases of BioUtopia and Justin’s solo work on Sanctioned thus far. Justin Beck spent one year starting in the summer of 2004 living in Germany where he formed his solo project Focus Group, studying at Tuebingen University and informally presenting a custom CD retrospective of his work to New Order/Joy Division’s Peter Hook in Brighton, England. Justin Beck is also a member of the United Nations Association of America, a branch of the United Nations dedicated to calling attention to UN issues at the local-regional level.
Justin has now recreated this music project under the name of Phokus Group and is also involved in an initiative to bring highly durable organizational software to development projects to the "Global South".