Twelve years ago, Aja West stood in the main chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza, head swimming in ancient history. Overcome by the power of the place, the soon-to-be Mercer Island High grad was overcome by a surreal vision: a rabbit atop a giant hamster wheel, running incessantly, going nowhere. He lost sensation in the left side of his body, a numbness that led to convulsions. As he recovered, his traveling companionsâas frightened by the experience as he wasâhelped him out to the open air.
Hours later, at dinner in Cairo, he was gripped by a seizure stronger than the first. He lurched to the restaurant's bathroom and promptly collapsed to the floor, the victim of a sudden stroke. He was 18 years old.
West immediately passed through a series of semimiraculous events that he semimiraculously remembers in excruciating detail. Someone helped him to a taxi that whisked him to a dubious-looking hospital. A doctor there told him his brain was swelling, building pressure in his skull, and that he was going to die. The doctor offered West two options: wait it out and go quietly or try taking a near-lethal dose of sedatives and steroids. West chose the latter. After several injections, his body, exhausted from its own rebellion, went slack.
West's parents had him airlifted to UW Medical Center and then moved him to Providence, where he stayed under close observation for three months. Perplexed doctors mixed and matched diseases to his symptoms. Eventually they settled on encephalitis, a poorly understood inflammation of the cerebral cortex, the most recently evolved part of the brain, where higher functions are processed. He was lucky he wasn't a vegetable. He was lucky to be alive.
It was a full three years after the incident before West emerged from the often-terrifying hallucinatory twilight brought on by the disease.
"That is the shit. That is what crafted me to do what I do, to paddle my own canoe," says West, drinking tea in his Georgetown home on a recent balmy evening. "The long-term experience of that nonconsensus reality really forced my hand. Making musicâthat's the best topographic map I can create, the organic medium of the music and then this technology I use to create it. It's all very mysterious and makes for great investigation."
For some seven years now, West has been producing album after album of slick, bubbly electro-funk and hard-swinging acid jazz under the name Mackrosoft. He's worked intimately with some of Seattle's best players, including saxophonist Skerik, vocalist Reggie Watts, and keysman Joe Doria, as well as big-time veterans like Headhunters drummer Mike Clark and JB's trombone alumnus Fred Wesley. Along with his brother Cheeba, he's been written up in national magazines like URB, XLR8R, and Wax Poetics. His music sells all over the world to a small but dedicated fan base.
"I stayed under the radar a little bit so I could work here and do my thing," he says. "I kind of had a strong feeling that I have to have one album for every year of my life. I'm making a big rush this year to catch up."
Sporting a platinum-blond buzz cut and matching goatee, West speaks in a manner that's relaxed but restless and enticingly nonlinear. His mind works "in 4-D," layering ideas and anecdotes and lacing them together with a loose narrative thread. In his living room is the studio setup he used to record the just-released Total Recall 2012âan album of smoothed-out future funk and neosoul R&B, which is getting play on KEXPâand the laptop he uses for postproduction. Pro Tools is the program of choice for just about any type of producer; West prefers an old version of Cubase because songs come together as color-coordinated segments as he constructs them, like a painting made of music.
"What would be called brain damage could also be called brain enhancement," West says. "I have certain skills that came from what happened, and I still see things in different waysâghost images, tracers, colors." He stays on a cocktail of antianxiety meds that keeps him psychologically aligned with the rest of the world. Mostly. "I don't have a lot of trust in reality," he says. "There's always a part of me that doubts what I'm experiencing."
The words of a near-death survivorâor a tripper. West is both, forced to battle his mind, volunteering to spelunk it with Zen meditation, rebirthing, and psychedelic drugs. He makes no bones about the role mushrooms played in his forming Mackrosoft.
"When I was in high school, I used to go to the Microsoft campus and pick mushrooms," he says. "That was the most plentiful spotâblue ringers, the most prevalent in this area. I'm an advanced mycologist, a mushroom expert. One could speculate that the people at Microsoft knew. I can't see how they didn't." Mackrosoft, the name of both his label and his rotating band, is a play on the software overlords that evokes an as-above-so-below continuity as well as something more playful.
"The mack, the pimp," West says. "It works perfectly with the aesthetic I likeâthe archetype of the clown, the doofus. I'm definitely playing like the trickster, not in any dark way, but that's a safer place for me to operate."
Because of health concerns, West has difficulty playing live, which is one reason he hasn't made much noise within the Seattle music community. He's a studio conductor in a city that loves live music. Still, he's found ways to get the word outâ"It spreads virally, not as intentionally," he says. He plans on following up 2012, his second album this year, with another five, for a total of seven in 2007. There's a DVD in production as well, a collection of all his music videos, filmed in places like Vietnam, Mumbai, and Sarajevo, troubled locales where he volunteered with local social workers. "Globetrotting to all these strange spots and looking into topics that seem importantânothing heavy, just weird and interesting shit," he says. Sort of like his recent tour for the album The Olympian, which brought him to Special Olympics groups and special-ed classrooms around the country. "The special-ed shows are the best," he says. "These kids just let loose like it's the greatest thing they've ever seen." Like them, West understands what it is to have a different, difficult take on the world.
"I assume my records will sell better in 30 years," West says. "That's the time frame I'm looking at. The best funk was coming out in the middle '70s, and it wasn't recognized until hiphop started sampling it years later. When I was younger, the lack of recognition pissed me off, but it's been a long time since it bothered me." 
