Ego Plum

Ego Plum
Plum at a panel for Making Fiends the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con
Background information
Born	(1975-02-27) February 27, 1975 (age 41) Los Angeles, California
Genres	Soundtrack, experimental, alternative rock, electronic, lo-fi
Instruments	Keyboards, guitar, bass guitar, drums, xylophone, banjo, ukulele
Years active	1996–present
Labels	Ebola Music
Website	www.egoplum.com
Notable instruments
Keyboards, guitar, bass guitar, drums, xylophone, banjo, ukulele

Ernesto Guerrero (born February 27, 1975), better known by his pseudonym Ego Plum, is an American composer, musician, visual artist and record producer based out of Los Angeles.

As a composer, Plum has worked in film, television and stage, most notably on several animated series for Nickelodeon and Disney Channel including the cult hits Making Fiends, Star vs. the Forces of Evil and the recent Harvey Beaks. A multi-instrumentalist, he has also performed and recorded in collaboration with numerous bands, musicians and composers including Danny Elfman, David J, Green Jellÿ, Black Francis, Gidget Gein, The Radioactive Chicken Heads and Genesis P. Orridge, as well has having released several albums worth of his own solo compositions under his label Ebola Music Records.

Although Plum has a propensity for humorously fabricating parts of his life story in interviews and self-penned biographies in what he claims is "an extension of his performance", such as often claiming to be the grandchild of Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo or having once been an ostrich rider in South Africa, it is known that he was born as Ernesto Guerrero in 1975 in Los Angeles. His father, a passionate Marxist, named him in honor of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. According to Plum, he randomly conceived his pseudonym as an adolescent and arbitrarily chose to use it for his early recordings before it ultimately stuck permanently, "like a drunken tattoo in Tijuana".

At age thirteen, Plum's older brothers took him to a performance of "Cube E", a three-act stage show by experimental music pioneers The Residents, which he has frequently cited as his initial inspiration to become a performer. "I became convinced that music could be weird, subversive and meaningful", he spoke of The Residents' influence, "I knew that one day I would be doing something similar". Plum immediately began composing music on his brothers' instruments and recording home-made demos on Casio keyboards with 4-track recorders. Plum is proficient on multiple instruments and yet is entirely self-taught; his biography on the Making Fiends website claims his only formal musical training was completing a tap dance class at East Los Angeles College.