Michael Stearns - Collected Ambient & Textural Works
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Track Listing
- Elysian E 9:14
- M'ocean 6:41
- Morning 7:16
- Ancient Leaves 4:35
- Subterranean Ambiance 4:16
- Rivers of Rhythm 4:27
- VIcki's Dance 4:59
- Jewel 9:52
- Night Currents 9:44
- The Dragon's Dream World 6:49
- Desert Moon Walk 6:00
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- This CD compiles the best of the first ten years of Michael StearnsŐs "ambient and textural" material, all long out of print or previously unreleased. Stearns anticipated the now-fashionable use of ambiences and exotic location sounds years before the Aphex Twin. The late 1970s was a very exciting time for me, both in terms of personal growth and laying a new musical foundation. I had been playing guitar since I was about 14 (1962), first in surf music bands, then backing up concert artists such as The Lovin Spoonful and Paul Revere and the Raiders, later evolving to acid rock, and finally, in the mid 1970s, playing in a Las Vegas style revue. In 1967 I began to evolve my own personal music and explore musically in non-traditional ways, starting with compositions for guitar, organ, voice, and processed tape. These early sonic explorations were musical hieroglyphics for the inner and outer changes I was experiencing. At first, the only frame of reference my audience had for my private music was the drug experience. Over the years, the music grew and evolved but I still had no public context to define and develop into support for it.
In 1975 I met Emilie Conrad-Daoud and her husband Gary at a workshop in my hometown of Tucson, Arizona. I had been playing music in local bands, had built my first recording studio, and was producing commercials. Gary was playing music for Emilie's workshops using a Mini Moog synthesizer and processed tape loops. His music resonated with the sensibilities of my private explorations. And he had a context for his work. During their stay in Tucson we had a chance to hang out together and share our music and visions. By the time they left I had been invited and encouraged to move to Los Angeles, study with Gary and Emilie, and play music at the Continuum studio. Within two weeks my girlfriend Susan Harper and I tied up all our loose ends in Tucson and moved to LA!
At their studio I met and played with Don Preston of the Mothers of Invention, and Craig Hundley, with whom I formed the free jazz trio Alivity and later began my explorations in film composition. I also played with Fred Stofet, an amazing percussionist who bowed cymbals and played trumpet-like sounds through various hoses. Several years later, synthesist Kevin Braheny also joined the studio. The body of the work was performing live music on a daily basis for classes of Emilie's students who had come to participate in the process that she called "Continuum." At that time, Continuum included ritual meditations, breathing and sounding explorations, and what Emilie called "cellular movement." Along with the class work, there was often opportunity for live public performances. By 1977, I had formed a small independent record label with Susan Harper and a close friend and investor, David Breuer. This was the year of our first releases, Desert Moon Walk and Sustaining Cylinders.
After the release of Ancient Leaves in 1978, I performed a concert series in Los Angeles and Berkeley called "The Voice of the Dragon." The concerts were based on a dream realm I had been entering in which there was no differentiation between sound, movement, and color. To bring these dreamings into concert form, I worked with dancers Susan Harper and Emilie Conrad Da-oud and lighting designer Marianne Schneller.
Just before traveling to Berkeley to perform, I received a call from Stephen Hill, who had a radio program on KPFA-FM in Berkeley on Thursday nights called Music from the Hearts of Space. He had been listening to Ancient Leaves and invited me to be interviewed on his show while I was in Berkeley for the concert. At that time he hosted his show with his former partner Anna Turner. This was the beginning of my long association with Stephen and Hearts of Space.
This CD features music from the early albums Desert Moon Walk [1977], Ancient Leaves [1978], Morning Jewel [1979, re-released on CD in 1985 as Jewel], Lyra [1983], Light Play [1983, re-released on CD in 1984 as M'ocean], and Floating Whispers [1987].
During the recording of the earliest of these works, "Vicki's Dance" and "Desert Moon Walk," I was playing live at the Continuum studio. The source material for these pieces was taken from those early live performances.
"Ancient Leaves" and "Elysian E" were two of my first composed pieces. They were recorded in 1977 for release by my record label Continuum Montage. On them I wove the sound of the Mini Moog, Yamaha CS-80 and other early electronic instruments with a Finnish kantele, Gregorian Chants, and my own voice.
In 1979, with the piece "Morning" I began weaving ambient recordings made during my travels into the fabric of the music. These early field recordings were made with a cassette recorder and a pair of Pearl microphones. For "Morning" I recorded the ambiance of a desert sunrise outside Tucson, Arizona, and early morning sounds of the jungle village of Yelapa, Mexico. "Jewel" was created on the "Eikosany" vibes, an instrument created by Erv Wilson. The "Eikosany" is a set of vibes with 20 tones to the octave. The raw recording was made by fading up the microphone after the impact of the mallet on the bar. This created a soft envelope for each note without the sharp sound of the mallet striking the metal. The recording was then slowed down and processed. The vocals were sung by Marsha Lee and then recomposed and edited to fit the piece. "Night Currents" was recorded late one night in Big Tujunga Canyon in Southern California. While hiking up the canyon, I had a close call with a rattlesnake who was out looking for a midnight snack.
"Subterranean Ambiance," "Rivers of Rhythm," and "The Dragons Dream World" were recorded with sculptor George Landry's Lyra Sound Constellation, an installation at the Double Rocking G Gallery in Los Angeles in the spring of 1983. 'Lyra' was a gigantic electronic harp over 35 feet across and 20 feet high, with 156 strings tuned in a microtonal scale. One played the instrument by moving through it while bowing and plucking the strings. I also collaborated with George Landry on "Landlight," featured on my 1993 Hearts of Space album Sacred Site. All these pieces were recorded live with the instrument. One of my concerts with Lyra was featured on Ripley's Believe It or Not on ABC Television.
Much of the material on this album was recorded on a four track analog tape recorder with no noise reduction. Every effort has been made through digital mastering to bring the material up to current standards.
Michael Stearns, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1996
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Michael Stearns - Collected Thematic Works
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Track Listing
- Spanish Twilight 4:46
- Her Way 3:41
- Dark Passage 4:43
- Space Grass 4:02
- A Moment Before 2:50
- The Reflecting Heart 6:03
- Bell Tear 1:56
- Plunge 5:29
- Almost Daybreak 5:31
- At the Bath 6:44
- Marriage Chords 8:25
- 3 Faces of the Goddess 1:08
- Voyager 3:05
- Floating Whispers 1:50
- Ancient Leaves 3:46
- Penguins on Mars 4:38
- Whoosh! 5:04
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- This CD compiles the best of the first ten years of Michael SternsŐs "thematic" work, which took off from his early experiences as a rock and surf band guitarist and matured into his famous soundtracks for widescreen films like Chronos and Baraka. Along with many of my composer friends and acquaintances from the late 1970s and early 1980s, I've occasionally been labeled a "New Age" composer. I remember one meeting held in Topanga Canyon with myself, Gary David, Stephen Hill, Georgia Kelly, Steven Halpern and others, to discuss what we could do about being labeled "New Age." Nothing.
Initially many of us did earn our bread and butter through a loose association with the New Age movement. At the time there were no formal distribution channels for such music, and many emerging artists made extra income on the New Age fair circuit. These were large public gatherings where people hawked everything from meditation techniques to communal life styles. We would travel around the country to different cities several times a year, set up booths and introduce the public to our music. Georgia Kelly, Constance Demby, Iasos, Steven Halpern, and Ethan Edgecomb of Fortuna Records were some of the others selling their music at these events. It was great exposure. During and after the shows we would get together to network, and exchange ideas.
As my main gig from 1975-1981, I played music for Emilie Conrad-Da'oud's Continuum Studio in Los Angeles. At Continuum, I was creating a live musical context for participants who were exploring what it might mean to be human in other than our habitual enculturated ways, through breathing, sounding, ritual meditations, and "cellular movement." It was a perfect context for my musical explorations and development, free from stylized musical forms and intonations. We created new musical instruments and new expressions, and wove into the fabric styles and instruments from other musical traditions. It was a very exciting time.
One of my other gigs was performing live at Brugh Joy and David Spangler's annual year-end conference at Asilomar, California. At this conference I would play live for the participants, along with other artists like Constance Demby, Larkin, Sandy Hirschman, Paul Abell, Georgia Kelly, Susan Osborn, and poet David Whyte. Stephen Hill had a large six channel surround sound system installed in the main hall, and he would spatially design and engineer all of the audio for us.
Steve Roach and I lived a few blocks away from each other and got together frequently, often helping with each others' projects. There was competition and camaraderie. As we were driven to create a musical metaphor for our experiences and explorations, the music evolved.
Concurrent with my other musical explorations, I began learning how to score music to picture and the technology of music recording for film. From 1979 through 1983, I worked with friend and composer Craig Huxley at his home studio in Sherman Oaks. The film scoring work varied from exploitation films like Schizoid to documentaries like ABC's The World of Explorers, and culminated in engineering the music for Firefox and Dreamscape for veteran film composer Maurice Jarre. In 1984, director Ron Fricke asked me to score the IMAX film Chronos, my first major solo effort. For Chronos I installed a six-channel discrete surround monitoring system in my studio in Santa Monica. This allowed me to compose an architectural score (along with the musical score) for the music and film soundtrack within the virtual theater environment of my studio. It also gave me the capability of producing and mixing sound tracks for large format films, which I immersed myself in for the next seven years.
This CD features music from my early albums Ancient Leaves [1978], Light Play [1983, re-released on CD as M'ocean in 1984], Plunge [1986], Floating Whispers [1987], and several previously unpublished pieces.
I composed and recorded Ancient Leaves at Continuum in the spring of 1977 and performed it live in August of that year at the "7-7-77" concert event in Ocean Park, California. The event featured myself, Francisco Lupica and his "Cosmic Beam Experience," dancer Lisa Walford, and other early New Age artists. After the release of Ancient Leaves on vinyl in 1978, I traveled to the San Francisco Bay area to perform "The Voice of the Dragon" concert series. While there, I met Stephen Hill and his former partner Anna Turner and was interviewed by them on their program Music From the Hearts of Space. At that time it was broadcast on Thursday nights on KPFA in Berkeley. Stephen was very interested in the context from which my music emerged, and shortly after the interview he traveled to Los Angeles and studied with Emilie for a month. While exploring at Continuum he stayed with me and Susan Harper, and we began to lay the foundation for what would be a long association that still continues.
In 1980, Susan Harper and I were married and I composed the piece "Marriage Chords" for the wedding. I performed it live at the wedding ceremony on the Serge modular synthesizer and recorded it with no overdubs. It was released initially on Light Play in 1983, and then re-released on M'ocean in 1984. In 1984, I arrived back in Los Angeles after traveling to Europe and Egypt with the Chronos film crew, and found a huge pile of new instruments and tape recorders literally sitting on my doorstep. "Voyager," a piece that I had entered in the Roland/Teac synthesizer tape contest, had won both First Place and Grand Prize.
"Three Faces of the Goddess Theme" and "Her Way" were created for a series of performances at the Asilomar conference, a collaboration between myself and dancers Susan Harper, Georgianne Cowan, Vicki Esken, Carolyn Conger, Sheila Rosen, and Stephanie Franz.
I released the albums Plunge in 1986 and Floating Whispers in 1987 between film projects. Plunge was a return to the guitar and some of the instruments and musical styles I had explored earlier in my life, while Floating Whispers was an album of ambient music.
"At the Bath" features early morning ambiance recorded near a water garden at an estate designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in California's Valley of the Moon.
"Almost Daybreak" was recorded using an early Oberheim system. This consisted of an OB-8 eight voice digitally controlled analog synthesizer, DMX drum machine, and DSX sequencer. It was the first system of its kind to integrate these components - the first digitally controlled "music workstation." Most of the other synthesizer work was done on a Serge Modular analog synthesizer, a favorite of that era. Kevin Braheny had introduced me to the Serge system. He was working for Serge at the time, and we were both playing live music and composing at the Continuum Studio. The tones created on the Serge became early trademark sounds, and you can still hear them in Kevin's and my music today.
Much of the material on this album was recorded on a four track analog tape recorder with no noise reduction. Every effort has been made through digital mastering to bring the material up to current standards.
Michael Stearns, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1996
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Michael Stearns - Encounter
release date: Wed Oct 31 2001
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Track Listing
- ENCOUNTER Awaiting the Other (MP3)
- CRAFT Dimensional Release (MP3)
- THE BEACON Those Who Have Gone Before (MP3)
- ON THE WAY Space Caravan
- DIMENSIONAL SHIFT Across the Threshold
- WITHIN Choir of the Ascending Spirit
- DISTANT THUNDER Solitary Witness
- ALIEN SHORE Starlight Bay
- PROCESSION Sacred Ceremony
- STAR DREAMS Peace Eternal
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Encounter is state of the art spacemusic by a master of the genre. It extends the style of MICHAEL STEARNS' early classic, Planetary Unfolding, and deepens the direction of his other early works, Chronos, and Floating Whispers.
An awesome experience of a UFO encounter - audio theater for the sonically adventurous. This powerful drama begins in the desert on a peaceful summer night, ascends through a speaker-shaking dimensional transition, and explores sonic spaces on the edges of experience, where we can meet "the Other."
Encounter is state of the art spacemusic by a master of the genre. It extends the style of MICHAEL STEARNS' early classic, Planetary Unfolding, and deepens the direction of his recent works, Chronos, and Floating Whispers.
"Michael Stearns is probably the best, and certainly the most consistently interesting and intriguing American synthesist around." - Audion Magazine
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Michael Stearns - Sacred Site
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Track Listing
- Genesis Voices/ Sacred Site Theme 6:32
- Baraka Theme 6:27
- Paha Sapa 3:12
- Tropical Rain Forest 5:53
- Land Light 4:51
- Sacred Site Soundtrack 7:06
- Twin Flame 5:00
- Return 11:43
- Chronos: Portraits Theme 4:41
- Chronos: Main Theme 2:14
- Chronos: Escalator Theme 2:12
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- The grand emotions evoked by these large, spatial sound structures resonate in the mind with a power that seems conscious of the immensity of time itself. I'm sure if Bach is still listening he's pleased and possibly a little jealous... Sacred Site marks the return of Michael Stearns as a solo artist after five busy years creating spectacular soundtrack music. Stearns saw the dawn of the 90's while traveling to Indonesia, Thailand, Egypt, Costa Rica, Brazil and the Galapagos Islands to record indigenous music and sound effects for film assignments. Arriving with an open mind and a finely tuned ear for ambience, he left stimulated -- not only by the exotic soundscapes and unfamiliar instruments he heard, but also by the powerful, elemental music of these ancient worlds. As a result, SACRED SITE shows a deeper integration of brilliant soundscape recordings and multi-cultural elements into Stearns's epic cinematic spacemusic style.
The monumental synthesized chord clusters in his theme for Sacred Site - first heard in his music for Lyra (Return) and Chronos - have evolved to advance the art of the fanfare to the borders of the cosmic. The grand emotions evoked by these large, spatial sound structures resonate in the mind with a power that seems conscious of the immensity of time itself. I'm sure if Bach is still listening he's pleased and possibly a little jealous.
More subtly dramatic are his majestic theme for "Baraka," with its dignified Indonesian gamelan cadences, the immensely mournful American Indian chanting of LESSERT MOORE on "Paha Sapa," the musical voices of the forest dwellers mingling with his suberb location recordings on pieces like "Tropical Rain Forest" and "Twin Flame." These musical soundscapes create an ineffable experience with the quality of dream, documentary, and poetic reverie all at once.
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Michael Stearns - The Lost World
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Track Listing
- Kama Meru 2:15
- Lost World Theme 5:08
- Ima Paru 5:04
- Maripak: the Last Pterodactyl 6:40
- Matawi: Killer of Men 4:55
- Sabana 4:21
- Volcano 4:32
- Auyan 2:35
- Warao 4:58
- St. Francis 5:53
- Crystal Canyon 3:50
- Lost World Reprise 4:26
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- Michael Stearns transports us to a Lost World of rare beauty and power. Stearns has been able to incorporate the indigenous sounds of this prehistoric realm into an aural environment that allows us to share the anticipation, exhilaration, and surprise of this journey. Nine thousand feet above sea level, in the wild southeastern corner of Venezuela, an ancient sandstone mesa rises eerily out of dense, swirling mists and fog. One of many strange and haunting tepuis that tower above almost impenetrable thickets of tropical rain forest, Mount Roraima stood in grand isolation for more than a million years before the first European explorers dared ascend to its forbidding summit.
Four years after a 1990 National Geographic article reminded him about Mount Roraima and The Lost World, MICHAEL STEARNS realized a dream that began in childhood - to trek to Venezuela's "Islands in Time" and experience a natural domain that remains astonishingly remote from the ravages and complexities of modern civilization.
It was 1595 when Sir Walter Raleigh recorded his sightings of a "crystal mountain" during his exploration of Guyana. But it was not until 1884 that the first European expedition reached the top of the greatest of all the region's crystal mountains, Mt. Roraima. The British botanist on that trip returned to England and lectured extensively on his discoveries. One audience member, Sir Arthur Conen Doyle, extrapolated those tales into his 1912 novel, The Lost World - a book which captivated the childhood imagination of Michael Stearns.
A world traveler who has brilliantly translated his explorations into such sonic masterpieces as Sacred Site (HS11038) and Singing Stones (HS11042), Stearns now transports us as listeners to a Lost World of rare beauty and unfathomable power. As a musician who has mastered modern audio technologies, Stearns has been able to incorporate the indigenous sounds of this prehistoric realm into an aural environment that allows us to share the anticipation, exhilaration, and surprise of this journey.
In the opening moments of the recording, Stearns translates the awesome majesty of a thousand foot high waterfall into a surging musical gateway. Integrating environmental sounds into a spacious swirl of electronics punctuated by crystalline percussion, he captures both the enormity and the delicate minutiae of the otherworldly setting, where unique species of orchids, frogs, and butterflies find refuge in rock formations shaped by nearly two billion years of ceaseless erosion. Pressing on, we hear the echoes of thunder, the hum of insects, the calls of birds, and soar toward the heavens as the magnificent operatic voice of KERI RUSHTOI rides the crest of Stearns's vast instrumental wash.
With each track of The Lost World, we turn another corner, marvel at an extraordinary indigenous species of orchid or butterfly, conquer a lofty peak, and experience the anticipation, trepidation, and exhilaration of an odyssey into the unknown. "The Gran Saban" is not all ethereal atmospherics; it teems with tropical life and human ritual, and Stearns apprehends the sounds of the earth, the animals, and the tribes who dwell there. With 'singing' stones, wooden flutes, whistles, percussion, on-site ambient recordings, wind harps, and Keri Rushtoi's magnificent vocals, Stearns evokes the natural majesty of the place. He captures the enigmatic tone of the myths and stories he heard from the native Pemon and Warao people. In doing so, he gives us an entirely fresh perspective on our own relationship to worlds lost and found.
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