Vivid images of distant swirling nebulae and clusters of galaxies intertwined, layered with the soft textured veneers of a shaman's robe, the slow swells of enveloping atmospheric vibrations, and the serene melodic incantations sung with a soft hush by the mythical sages of old — that is the ambient music of STOLACE.
"SPACES" is a new album series exploring the interconnected relationship between sound, the listener, and the spaces that envelop us in between. Discover more from the SPACES series.
The Insomnia Sessions is a brand new series of improvisational ambient and atmospheric music made in the quiet, waking hours of the night when all others are deeply held by sleep's grip. It's in these moments that I turn my affliction into soothing artistic expressions, and allow the creativity in the universe to rise up within me and tell its own story moment by moment through ambient soundscapes.
One of the more recent shifts in my exploration of ambient music has been to get out and about, and make music on location, using the space as a source of inspiration and exploration — notably observing the relationship between sound, the listener, and the spaces in between that envelop us.
The rig that I use for these pop-up mobile performances is fairly simple — an Arturia Microfreak as the primary sound source, a variety of effect pedals including the Eventide Blackhole, and the Boss RC-505 MKII loop station to build out my ideas into full-fledged live compositions. Some of the SPACES performances also include a video that captures the live experience.
Marking the last of the live ambient music series on Twitch, the numeric album series is a collection of compositions created for and aired on season two (the final season) of The Relay Station on Twitch before it became a radio program in November of 2022.
The numeric album series is a wide exploration of different sonic spaces — from traditional ambient and atmospheric music, to neoclassical expressions, new age instrumentals, and other interesting explorations of sound and space. Which is your favorite from the numeric series?
Tracked during the early months in 2022, "Relay Station: Artemis" is a collection of improvisational ambient and neoclassical compositions produced for the original Relay Station live stream on Twitch. This collection of cosmos-themed compositions is an auditory exhibition that pays a tribute of gratitude for NASA's "ARTEMIS" project to bring humans back to the moon for further exploration and scientific inquiry.
More than just a collection of ambient compositions, these long-form albums are seamless musical experiences from start to finish. This borderless exploration of sonic spaces started with a live stream experiment on Twitch, to stay in the ambient improvisational flow state for sixty-two minutes, which resulted in the first of these, "Relay Station // Sixty-Two". These long-form albums are intended to take you to meditative, picturesque spaces within the mind, a free-fall exploration of ambiance, resonance, pitch, texture, and movement.
The Dark Matter trilogy from the Relay Station album series is a cinematic follow-up to the "Into the Nebula" trilogy — a deep-space exploration of the spaces in between things, the mysterious void we call "dark matter". Created out of the Relay Station live streams on Twitch, this album is rich with textures, ambient movement, spacial resonance, and open spaces for the imagination to take hold and whisk you off to wondrous spaces within.
"Into the Nebula" is a trilogy of ambient, atmospheric, and neoclassical works created on the Relay Station live Twitch streams, resulting in a cinematic soundscape that awaits you the listener, to formulate the screenplay in your imagination. These three albums have a formless storyline woven from start to finish, and awaits your creativity to fill in the details. What exactly transpired when the crew of the deep space exploration vessel RS4 passed through the heart of the nebula? The mystery remains for you to decide.
The Relay Station originated as an ambient improvisational live stream on Twitch in March of 2021. Each week I would compose approximately an hour's worth of ambient improv compositions, play them on the program, and then follow it up with a few hours of live improvisational performances, spanning through the ambient, atmospheric, and neoclassical genres. These albums are some of the more memorable or noteworthy results from creating and performing on a weekly basis for nearly a whole year.
The compositions aren't marked by perfection or bleeding edge innovation, but rather free-form exploration of textures, spacial relationships, resonance, melodic motifs, and ambient environments. In a way, they're more like snapshots in time than they are traditionally composed compositions, and will likely never be reproduced in the same way ever again.
You can watch and listen to many of the lives stream performances on the STOLACE YouTube channel, where you can find the playlists for Season One and Season Two of The Relay Station live stream on Twitch.
In addition to creating ambient and neoclassical compositions, I have a few compositions that I worked on over the year that fell well outside the ambient genre. I've got a few singles and EPs that skirt other more mainstream genres. Some of the notable singles include "Monster" (exploring the struggle with imposter syndrome), "Echo" (a piece which puts social media into the interrogation light), and "Not Alone" (featuring the sweet, sweet voice of Faye from South Africa).
Included in this list is the original EPs "Terminus" and the unreleased "Vol 1" which includes instrumental works created at the inception of STOLACE. "Terminus" is a dramatic exploration of the fragility and ephemeral nature of humanity, which was the ultimate outcome of a Stoic exercise to "rehearse one's death" — that is, to meditate on one's mortality as to help one re-orient their priorities toward a live well-lived.
It was three months into the COVID pandemic and I was growing stir-crazy like the rest of us, and at the time was struggling to find any motivation for creating music under the strange near-dystopian feel of lock-down. One morning in the summer of 2021, I woke up from a Saturday afternoon nap and had this vivid thought enter my pink meat computer, "hey, let's study Pink Floyd's album "Dark Side of the Moon" intensely, strip it down to its essentials, and then recreate it from the ground-up with my own interpretation, sensibilities, and inspirations.
After four months of intense recording and editing sessions, my re-imagination of "Dark Side of the Moon" was released in November of 2021, and soon followed up with the psychedelic visualization of "Dark Side of the Moon" on YouTube. The album was featured on DJ Jake Rudh's Transmission Music program and has also amassed over 25,000 views on YouTube.