Chris Strouth | |
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Background information | |
Born | [1] | July 28, 1968
Origin | Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States |
Genres | Electronic, new music, ambient, indie rock |
Occupation(s) | Musician, composer, producer, filmmaker, writer, multimedia artist |
Years active | 1986–present |
Labels | UltraModern Records, Innova Recordings, Twin/Tone |
Chris Strouth is an American, Minneapolis-based musician, producer, writer and filmmaker who has been active since 1986, most notably as the founder and organizer of 1990s/2000s electronica collective Future Perfect Sound System, and most recently as the bandleader and composer for experimental/electronic band Paris 1919. [2] His behind-the-scenes production work includes Indianapolis multimedia artist Stuart Hyatt's Grammy-nominated album The Clouds . [3] Strouth also gained national attention in 2009 when he received a life-saving kidney transplant from a donor who connected with him on Twitter, which is believed to be the first such transplant arranged entirely through social networking. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Strouth was raised in Fridley, Minnesota. He became interested in art and music at an early age, learning how to experiment with tape recorders at age seven. [9]
Strouth has been heavily involved in the Twin Cities arts and music community from a young age. His early work included curating multimedia events incorporating art and electronic music at underground art spaces including Rifle Sport Gallery, [10] Hair Police [11] and Red Eye Collaboration. [12] The day after his high school graduation in 1986, Strouth began volunteering at Rifle Sport on Minneapolis' then-notorious Block E. [13] He quickly became publicity director, and eventually managed the space. At the same time, Strouth was a member of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon's chapter at the University of Minnesota. On the podcast Legacy Matters, he said that even though his art-punk sensibility wasn't an obvious match for a straitlaced organization such as DKE ("I had blue hair and a cape when I pledged," he noted), "I liked this idea of having a connection greater than myself. At a time when I was absolutely rootless, I needed something that gave me roots, because I didn't have family to connect to. It was really kind of powerful." [14]
As a performer, Strouth has played in a range of styles including techno, jazz, and punk. [15] He has also worked frequently as an organizer of entire scenes of bands, typified by the electronica collective Future Perfect Sound System, which he founded in 1995.
The collective was an important early exponent of electronic music and rave culture in the Midwest, receiving favorable comparisons to Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events. [16] Future Perfect performed frequently at First Avenue nightclub, the Walker Art Center, Weisman Art Museum, [17] and other galleries, with showcases that sometimes drew more than 30 performers, [18] [19] and released two albums, 1997's Music For Listening [20] and 2001's The Nature of Time . [21] [22] [23]
In 2009, Strouth founded another musical collective, Paris 1919, named for the post-World War I artistic renaissance. [24] The project was founded shortly before his diagnosis with kidney disease, and Strouth's compositions for the band often deal with his illness and recovery. For instance, the short piece "Blood Mountain" is about Strouth's experience on dialysis, and bases its core rhythms on those of dialysis machines. [25] Paris 1919 began as a solo, studio-bound experiment in sonic collages; Strouth has described the music as sounding "weird and chaotic and structureless and purposely off-beat" [2] but notes that it is also created from a painstaking process which may involve more than 1,000 edits. [25] It grew into a semi-improvisational live band with a rotating membership, which has performed a series of multimedia shows combining music, theater and dance in immersive environments, often working with choreographer Deborah Jinza Thayer. 2014's "Antarctica" used the theme of an ice cave to explore Strouth's journey through his kidney ailment and recovery. [26] The same year's "Safe As Houses" placed both performers and audience in a giant dollhouse as a metaphor for the housing crisis and Strouth's own loss of his home the year before. [27] [28]
Paris 1919 has also recorded and released several albums. Book Of Job was released in 2011 on Go Johnny Go Records. [29] [30] Antarctica, a companion album to the stage performance, was released in 2017 by UltraModern Records. [31] In 2018, Strouth released Risking Light, a soundtrack album to director Dawn Mikkelson's documentary about forgiveness. [32] [33] [34] Although credited to Paris 1919, the album was written and performed by Strouth as a solo work. [35] A fourth album, Collected Short Fictions, was never released, but in 2022, Strouth compiled several of the songs intended for the album as the collection Future Archaeology, which consists of material originally recorded circa 2010 to 2012.
Strouth has also frequently led Paris 1919 in creating live soundtracks to silent films, including Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog , [2] and the 1930 mystery The Bat Whispers at the 2014 Minneapolis Comic-Con. [36]
Strouth composed, produced and (with storyteller and comedian Matt Fugate) co-wrote the 2004 jazz and spoken-word holiday album Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail , which features a band including saxophonist George Cartwright of the jazz group Curlew. [37] Originally created in 1993 for a performance-art series at Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis, a revised version was recorded in 2003 and issued privately as a Christmas gift. The following year, the album was given a wider release by Innova Recordings. A remastered digital edition of Snaildartha was released by Stand Up! Records on November 13, 2020. [38] The album has developed a cult following thanks to its regular inclusion in DJ Jon Solomon's daylong marathon of Christmas music on Princeton, New Jersey radio station WPRB-FM, [39] as well as an annual Christmas broadcast on KFAI in Minneapolis. [38] The album's reputation has continued to grow with time; in 2022, Vulture writer Maura Johnston named Snaildartha one of the 50 best Christmas albums of the last 30 years, calling it "an ideal lazy Christmas Day soundtrack" that "gets even better with repeated listenings." [40]
In 2011, Strouth was a conductor for the four-act opera Czeslaw's Loop, performed live on a floating barge on the Mississippi River, which included performers as diverse as classical soprano Maria Jette, techno-pop group Information Society's Paul Robb, and Tom Hazelmyer of the punk band Halo of Flies. [41] [42]
In 2018, Paris 1919 performed ...For Now, a project combining symphonic, Eastern European, minimalistic, and Renaissance folk music elements, at the Church of St. Boniface in Minneapolis. Strouth joked to an interviewer for Minnesota Public Radio that ...For Now was his "middle-aged symphony to God," referencing Brian Wilson's description of the Beach Boys album Smile as a "teenage symphony to God." [24]
Strouth's early band King Paisley and the Pscho-del-ics performed at Rifle Sport [10] and released a nine-song album in 1986, Death Rockin', which was re-released in 2011 on Go Johnny Go. [29]
Besides composing and performing music, Strouth founded his own label, UltraModern Records, in 1995, [43] and was the director of artists and product at two other influential Minneapolis labels, Twin/Tone Records (1995–2001) [15] [44] and Innova Recordings (2001–2004). [45] At Innova, Strouth worked on albums by dozens of artists including Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, Beat Circus, Matthew Burtner, George Cartwright, Victoria Jordanova, Phillip Johnston, and Hyatt's Grammy-nominated album The Clouds . [3] Twin/Tone, already nationally prominent thanks to a roster including alternative-rock pioneers The Replacements, grew to develop an umbrella relationship with a dozen smaller indie labels, including UltraModern. [46]
UltraModern focused on neo-psychedelic, indie-pop, [12] and noise/electronic rock, [10] releasing albums by musicians including ex-Wall Of Voodoo leader Stan Ridgway, jazz guitarist Skip Heller, Future Perfect Sound System, Ousia, and Savage Aural Hotbed. UltraModern received wider distribution through partnerships with Twin/Tone, Atomic Theory Records, and New West Records. [12] The label's catalog includes:
Strouth's documentary Unconvention: A Mix-Tape from St. Paul, RNC '08 , filmed in 2008 and released in 2009, covered the contentious 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. [59] The film edits together a wide variety of film and video shot by dozens of independent journalists and citizen videographers with divergent political viewpoints, compiling a mosaic of perspectives on the four days of the convention. [60] Unconvention was one of eight full-length features chosen to debut as part of the "Minnesota Made" series at the 2009 Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Film Festival. [61]
Strouth and Minneapolis filmmaker Rick Fuller also co-produced a DVD companion to Stan Ridgway's Holiday in Dirt album featuring 14 short films based on Ridgway's songs, which was released in 2005. [62] In 2006, they co-produced the documentary The M-80 Project, which chronicled a 1979 New Wave music festival at the Walker Art Center. [63] The original videotapes of the groundbreaking festival had gone missing soon after filming; Strouth spent several years trying to find them, and then several more securing music rights for the documentary. The finished film played at several festivals and other venues including Alamo Draft House, San Francisco's Noise Pop Film Festival, Minneapolis' Sound Unseen and the Northwest Film Forum, before one musician unexpectedly withdrew his permission to use footage of his band, eventually leading to the mothballing of the project. [64] [65] [66] [67]
From 1994 to 1996, Strouth produced the documentary series What, which covered the Minneapolis pop and rock scene, for Twin Cities public television station KTCA. [23]
In 2009, Strouth learned that he would need a kidney transplant due to the effects of IgA nephropathy [68] (which he nicknamed "Harold" as a way of coping with the disease). [15] He found a matching donor, Scott Pakudaitis, after sharing the news with his followers on Twitter and Facebook, and underwent a successful transplant at the University of Minnesota Medical Center in December 2009. The two men never met in person until the day of the surgery. [69] [70] It is believed to be the first such transplant arranged entirely through social networking. [4] The story received nationwide media attention on ABC News, [7] Reader's Digest, [8] MTV, [6] and The Ricki Lake Show . [5] Following his recovery, Strouth has been a board member of the Minnesota chapter of the National Kidney Foundation since 2010. Strouth had a second kidney transplant in 2022. [71]
Strouth writes and illustrates the column "Makes No Sense at All" for the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages . [72] He has also written for publications such as The Growler [73] and America Online's Digital City. [74]
Soul Asylum is an American rock band formed in 1981 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their 1993 hit "Runaway Train" won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song.
The music of Minnesota began with the native rhythms and songs of Indigenous peoples, the first inhabitants of the lands which later became the U.S. state of Minnesota. Métis fur-trading voyageurs introduced the chansons of their French ancestors in the late eighteenth century. As the territory was opened up to white settlement in the 19th century, each group of immigrants brought with them the folk music of their European homelands. Celtic, German, Scandinavian, and Central and Eastern European song and dance remain part of the vernacular music of the state today.
Twin/Tone Records was an independent record label based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which operated from 1977 until 1994. It was the original home of influential Minnesota bands the Replacements and Soul Asylum and was instrumental in helping the Twin Cities music scene achieve national attention in the 1980s. Along with other independent American labels such as SST Records, Touch and Go Records, and Dischord, Twin/Tone helped to spearhead the nationwide network of underground bands that formed the pre-Nirvana indie-rock scene. These labels presided over the shift from the hardcore punk that then dominated the American underground scene to the more diverse styles of alternative rock that were emerging.
Stefon Leron Alexander, better known by his stage name P.O.S, is an American hip hop artist from Minneapolis. He has been a member of groups such as Doomtree, Building Better Bombs, Gayngs, Marijuana Deathsquads, Cenospecies, Four Fists, and Shredders.
Doomtree is an American hip hop collective and record label based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The collective has seven members: Dessa, Cecil Otter, P.O.S, Sims, Mike Mictlan, Paper Tiger, and Lazerbeak. The collective is known for incorporating a wide range of musical influences into their work with lyrical complexity and wordplay, and their annual "Doomtree Blowout" events held in Minneapolis venues to showcase their group performances and the Twin Cities music scene.
Savage Aural Hotbed is a "found object" band based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Formed in 1988, SAH is a four-member band that performs instrumental percussive and ambient music. They are heavily influenced by Japanese taiko drumming, but also feature usage of home-made instruments, metal and plastic barrels, saw-blades, power-tools, and other hardware, both in the albums and in the live shows. They have released seven albums.
Andrew Sims, better known mononymously as Sims, is an American rapper from Minneapolis. He has been a member of Doomtree and Shredders.
Rifle Sport Alternative Art Gallery was an underground art space open from 1985 to 1988 in the Block E segment of Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was an important and groundbreaking venue for non-mainstream and punk-rock art in the Twin Cities. Writer Andy Sturdevant has noted that the gallery's memory and influence have lasted among Twin Cities artists long after its closure, "like it might have happened in a Jacques-Louis David painting."
Paris 1919 may refer to:
Rifle Sport was an American post punk band active in the 1980s and 1990s, from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Communist Daughter is an indie rock band from Saint Paul, Minnesota, founded by Johnny Solomon in 2009. They have released three albums and three EPs.
Anatomy is an album by Stan Ridgway. It was released in October 1999 through New West Records. The disc is a multimedia CD that includes three songs, "Camouflage," "I Wanna Be A Boss," and "The Roadblock," in the now-defunct Liquid Audio format, which were recorded live at the Strand in Los Angeles on November 2, 1991.
Holiday in Dirt is an album by Stan Ridgway, released in 2002 through Ultramodern/New West Records. It is a collection of leftovers, rarities, compositions for film soundtracks. A quasi-cinematic project, the release of the Holiday in Dirt album was accompanied by a showing of 14 short films by various independent filmmakers, each film a visual interpretation of one of the songs on the album. A compilation DVD of the films, titled Holiday in Dirt: 14 Short Films of the Music of Stan Ridgway and produced by Minneapolis filmmakers Chris Strouth and Rick Fuller, was released in February 2005.
Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail - A Soul Jazz Extravaganza is a 2004 jazz and spoken-word holiday album. It was composed and produced by Chris Strouth, and performed by the Snaildartha 6 combo, which includes saxophonist George Cartwright of the jazz group Curlew and storyteller and comic Matt Fugate, who wrote the text with Strouth. The album retells the story of Buddha through a small snail, Jerry the Christmas Snail, who achieves enlightenment after meeting and having adventures with other Christmas-themed animals on a pilgrimage to the North Pole, eventually meeting and bonding with Santa Claus. The title is a pun on the Buddha's birth name, Siddhartha.
Future Perfect Sound System: Music for Listening, a compilation of electronica, techno and trance music, is the first album by Twin Cities-based electronica collective Future Perfect Sound System. The album features work from a diverse range of electronica genres, and was organized and orchestrated by Minneapolis producer Chris Strouth.
The Nature of Time is the second album by Twin Cities-based electronica collective Future Perfect Sound System. The album features work from a diverse range of electronica genres. It was produced by Future Perfect organizer and Minneapolis record producer Chris Strouth, and released by Minneapolis record label Innova Recordings. A loose-knit concept album revolving around allegorical notions of time, The Nature of Time was conceived as a continuation of a March 2000 Future Perfect performance at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art in Minneapolis, though the individual songs were recorded by the various groups separately in the studio.
Boiled in Lead is a rock/world-music band based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and founded in 1983. Tim Walters of MusicHound Folk called the group "the most important folk-rock band to appear since the 1970s." Influential record producer and musician Steve Albini called the band's self-titled first album "the most impressive debut record from a rock band I've heard all year." Their style, sometimes called "rock 'n' reel," is heavily influenced by Celtic music, folk, and punk rock, and has drawn them praise as one of the few American bands of the 1980s and 1990s to expand on Fairport Convention's rocked-up take on traditional folk. Folk Roots magazine noted that Boiled in Lead's "folk-punk" approach synthesized the idealistic and archival approach of 1960s folk music with the burgeoning American alternative-rock scene of the early 1980s typified by Hüsker Dü and R.E.M. The band also incorporates a plethora of international musical traditions, including Russian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Scottish, Vietnamese, Hungarian, African, klezmer, and gypsy music. Boiled in Lead has been hailed as a pioneering bridge between American rock and international music, and a precursor to Gogol Bordello and other gypsy-punk bands. While most heavily active in the 1980s and 1990s, the group is still performing today, including annual St. Patrick's Day concerts in Minneapolis. Over the course of its career, Boiled in Lead has released nearly a dozen albums and EPs, most recently 2012's The Well Below.
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Flowers Studio is a recording studio in Minneapolis founded by Ed Ackerson, leader of the alternative rock bands Polara and the 27 Various, and co-founder of the Susstones Records label. Many notable musicians have recorded at the studio, including the Jayhawks, The Replacements, Motion City Soundtrack, Brian Setzer, Golden Smog, Mark Mallman, Soul Asylum, the Old 97's Rhett Miller, Clay Aiken, the Wallflowers, Pete Yorn, Juliana Hatfield, Free Energy, Lizzo, Jeremy Messersmith, and Joseph Arthur.
Chris Maddock is an American stand-up comedian from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has released two albums and a DVD on Dan Schlissel's Stand Up! Records, most recently 2020's Country Music Legend, which reached No. 5 on the iTunes comedy chart.