Aaron Strumpel grew up in a hundred year old house surrounded by corn in the state of Iowa. It had creaky wooden floors underneath the ratty carpet which covered the fifty year old linoleum that was just about impossible to scrape off. It's walls were made of plaster and lattice and he found old treasures in them as a boy while ripping them down for new drywall.

As he grew, he began collecting sounds and textures, ratty and sublime, the first sound being a seventy-five dollar Conn trumpet his parents bought him in fifth grade. Through the years he collected more and more of these treasures and began plastering them into the walls of his imagination and dreams.

Strumpel’s first band post-music education/jazz/composition studies was a duo called The Restoration Project. Eventually he came into an artist community called Enter the Worship Circle which recorded his first solo album and a subsequent collaborative album. He still loves to play and tour Enter the Worship heavily. It was during this time he also co-wrote songs with the much loved and hated author Brian McLaren for a project to accompany Brian’s book, Everthing Must Change. On the touring front, Strumpel has visited forty states, eleven countries, three continents, and has easily played over five hundred shows without the help of a booking agent.

Since then Strumpel has immersed himself in a new, imaginative project called "Elephants." While he's done the jazz thing, the classical, the folk, the worship, the acoustic, this new material does something different...Todd Fadel of Agents of Future calls it an "acoustica-electronica-operatic-spokes-troubadour-for-the-mangled-masses that digs deep with a collection of newly-dusted relational relics of primal pomp.” Indeed, the new material is dense, captivating, and in need of verbose explanations. It’s a tremendously bold about-face from his stripped-down earlier works, but the pieces maintain a solid foundation that has allowed Strumpel to let his imaginative legs have room to stretch.