Carl Stone

Last updated
Carl Stone
Carl Stone in music is (Speaking Portraits) (Vol. I).jpg
Stone in music is (Speaking Portraits) (Vol. I)
Background information
Birth nameCarl Joseph Stone
Born (1953-02-10) February 10, 1953 (age 71)
Los Angeles [1]

Carl Stone (born Carl Joseph Stone, February 10, 1953) is an American composer, primarily working in the field of live electronic music. His works have been performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the Near East.

Contents

Biography

From 1966 to 1969 he formed a band with Z'EV and James Stewart, performing jazz rock. After auditioning for Frank Zappa's Bizarre Records, the band ceased activities and both he and Z'EV went on to attend CalArts. [2] [3] [4]

Stone studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972.

Stone utilizes a laptop computer as his primary instrument and his works often feature very slowly developing manipulations of samples of acoustic music, speech, or other sounds. Because of this, as well as his preference for tonal melodic and harmonic materials similar to those used in popular musics, Stone's work has been associated with the movement known as minimalism.

Carl Stone performing at Cite de la Musique, Paris, November 1, 2003 CS.Cite1small.jpg
Carl Stone performing at Cité de la Musique, Paris, November 1, 2003

Prior to his settling on the laptop, in the 1980s, he created a number of electronic and collage works utilizing various electronic equipment as well as turntables. Prominent works from this period include Dong Il Jang (1982) and Shibucho (1984), both of which subjected a wide variety of appropriated musical materials (e.g. Okinawan folk song, European Renaissance music, 1960s Motown, etc.) to fragmentation and looping. In this way his work paralleled innovations being made in the early days of rap and hip hop (e.g. Grandmaster Flash, of whose work he was unaware at the time). It was during this period that he began naming many of his works after his favorite restaurants (often Asian ones).

His first residency in Japan, sponsored by the Asian Cultural Council, was from November 1988 to April 1989. While living in Tokyo he collected more than 50 hours of recordings of the city's urban soundscape, which he later used as the basis for his radio composition Kamiya Bar, sponsored by Tokyo FM radio, and released on a CD of the same name by the Italian label NewTone / Robi Droli.

Stone has collaborated frequently with Asian performers, including traditional instrumentalists such as Min Xiao-Fen (pipa), Yumiko Tanaka (shamisen), Kazue Sawai (koto), Michiko Akao (ryuteki), and those working with modern instruments, such as Otomo Yoshihide (turntables, guitar), Kazuhisa Uchihashi (guitar, daxophone), Yuji Takahashi (computer, piano), and vocalists such as Reisu Saki and Haco. He has also collaborated on an album with Hirohito Ihara's Radicalfashion with Alfred Harth who partly lives in Korea, and with Miki Yui who lives in Düsseldorf.

Beginning in the early years of the 21st century, Stone began to compose more frequently for acoustic instruments and ensembles, completing a new work for the San Francisco Bay Area-based American Baroque.

Stone served as president of the American Music Center from 1992 to 1995, and was director of Meet the Composer/California from 1981 to 1997. He also served as music director of KPFK-FM in Los Angeles from 1978 to 1981.

For many years, Stone has divided his time between California and Japan.

Stone received a 1999 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Works

Solo recordings

Some unreleased recordings

Other released collaborations

Realistic Monk, (2015–present) collaboration with sound artist Miki Yui

Pict.soul (2000–2001) – Long-distance collaboration with Tetsu Inoue
Monogatari: Amino Argot (1994) – Long-distance collaboration with Otomo Yoshihide
Over-Ring-Under (1992) – Soundtrack to a videogame CD-ROM, with visual artist Teckon

Other commissioned works

Related Research Articles

Paul Lansky is an American composer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fennesz</span> Austrian electronic musician and guitarist

Christian Fennesz is a producer and guitarist active in electronic music since the 1990s, often credited simply by his last name. His work utilizes guitar and laptop computers to blend melody with treated samples and glitch production. He lives and works in Vienna, and currently records on the UK label Touch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Otomo Yoshihide</span> Japanese multi-instrumentalist

Otomo Yoshihide is a Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist. He mainly plays guitar, turntables, and electronics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morton Subotnick</span> American neo-classical composer and avant-garde electronic musician

Morton Subotnick is an American composer of electronic music, best known for his 1967 composition Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record company, Nonesuch. He was one of the founding members of California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for many years.

Erstwhile Records is an independent record label devoted to free improvisation, particularly the electroacoustic variety, contemporary, experimental composed music, and combinations of both. Erstwhile was founded by Jon Abbey in 1999, whose personality and tastes are closely identified with the label.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karlheinz Essl Jr.</span>

Karlheinz Essl is an Austrian composer, performer, sound artist, improviser, and composition teacher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Z'EV</span> American percussionist

Z'EV was an American poet, percussionist, and sound artist. After studying various world music traditions at CalArts, he began creating his own percussion sounds out of industrial materials for a variety of record labels. He is regarded as a pioneer of industrial music.

Tim Perkis is an experimental musician and writer who works with live electronic and computer sound.

A laptop orchestra or laptop ensemble (LE) is a chamber music ensemble consisting primarily of laptops. Education based laptop orchestras include SCLOrk , BLOrk, CLOrk, CMLO, HELO, L2OrkOLO, PLOrk, SLOrk, SAMPLE, and ELUNM (Ensamble de Laptops de la Universidad Nacional de Música in Peru. City based laptop orchestras include BiLE, MiLO, and BSBLOrk, MLOrk.

Starkland is an independent record label based in Boulder, Colorado that specializes in alternative classical music. It was founded in 1991 by Thomas Steenland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jay Cloidt</span>

Jay Cloidt is an American composer, performer, sound designer, and audio engineer.

Peter Zinovieff was a British composer, musician and inventor. In the late 1960s, his company, Electronic Music Studios (EMS), made the VCS3, a synthesizer used by many early progressive rock bands such as Pink Floyd and White Noise, and Krautrock groups as well as more pop-orientated artists, including Todd Rundgren and David Bowie. In later life, he worked primarily as a composer of electronic music.

Tim Wright has been active as a musician and composer since the early 1990s, working predominantly at the experimental end of the spectrum of electronica and dance music. Besides his birth name, Wright has worked under various names, most notably Germ. He also worked under the name Tube Jerk, a solo project. He was a founding member of Sand, a five-piece experimental rock/jazz/electronic group. Other pseudonyms he has used include Pin, Moondog, Asphere, Speed Baby.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Brady</span> Canadian composer, musician and producer

Timothy Wesley John Brady is a Canadian composer, electric guitarist, improvising musician, concert producer, record producer and cultural activist. Working in the field of contemporary classical music, experimental music, and musique actuelle, his compositions utilize a variety of styles from serialism to minimalism and often incorporate modern instruments such as electric guitars and other electroacoustic instruments. His music is marked by a synthesis of musical languages, having developed an ability to use elements of many musical styles while retaining a strong sense of personal expression. Some of his early recognized works are the 1982 orchestral pieces Variants and Visions, his Chamber Concerto (1985), the chamber trio ...in the Wake..., and his song cycle Revolutionary Songs (1994).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erdem Helvacıoğlu</span> Turkish electronic musician (born 1975)

Erdem Helvacioglu is an electronic musician from Turkey. He has collaborated with artists Mick Karn, Kevin Moore, John Wilson, Kazuya Ishigami, and Saadet Turkoz. He also composes music for theatre, film and multimedia productions, and produces for popular and rock music bands in Turkey. He has received numerous international awards including prizes from the Luigi Russolo and Insulae Electronicae Electroacoustic Music Competitions.

Fabio Cifariello Ciardi is an Italian composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Merzbow</span> Japanese noise project

Merzbow is a Japanese noise project started in 1979 by Masami Akita, best known for a style of harsh, confrontational noise. Since 1980, Akita has released over 500 recordings and has collaborated with numerous artists.

John Wall is an English autodidact electronic composer, whose contribution to the field is widely noted by critics of new music. His work has moved from early plunderphonic compositions – where he brought together unlikely combinations of musical genres to create fantastical new works – to large scale works composed of thousands of tiny fragments which create the impression of virtual orchestras. Critics have remarked on "his extraordinary feeling for musical narrative" which is achieved through a working method that has been described as "phenomenally painstaking". According to one critic, Wall's "releases sound like the most finely crafted audio sculptures, somewhere between the contemporary composition of Lachenmann and the experiments of early laptop musicians of the mid 90s."

Yannis Kyriakides is a composer of contemporary classical music, and sound art. His music explores new forms and hybrids of media, synthesizing disparate sound sources and highlighting the sensorial space of music. He has focused in the majority of his work on ways of combining traditional performance practices with digital media, particularly in the use of live electronics. The relation between music and language has been explored in many pieces that utilize text films as a multimedia element.

Henry Vega is a composer and Electroacoustic musician from New York City, currently living in The Hague, Netherlands. He founded The Spycollective in 2006, a now defunct music, theater and dance group, and is a founding director of Artek Foundation. Vega has been composing and performing internationally since 2001 and is also a founding member of The Electronic Hammer trio with Diego Espinosa and Juan Parra Cancino. He is married to Polish composer Kasia Glowicka.

References

  1. "Who is Carl Stone?" . Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  2. Dmitri Kolesnik (June 1999). "Z'EV – Acoustic Phenomenae". Drugie Here. Retrieved 2008-07-25.
  3. Re/Search (2006) [1983]. No. 6/7 Industrial Culture Handbook, Limited Hardback Edition. San Francisco: RE/Search. p. 116. ISBN   978-1-889307-16-9.
  4. Mike Hovancsek. "Z'EV: Swords into Plowshares". Archived from the original on 2008-10-20. Retrieved 2008-11-12.
  5. "Namidabashi, by Carl Stone". Touch: Displacing. Retrieved 2021-12-30.
  6. Williger, Jonathan (November 17, 2020). "Carl Stone: Stolen Car". Pitchfork . Retrieved December 11, 2020.

Reviews

Listening