About this artist
Carl Stone is a pioneer of sample-based composition as well as live computer music. Based in both California and Japan, he has been composing electro-acoustic music since 1972, and using computers for live performances since 1986. His work often stretches fragments of audio into hypnotic, slowly changing soundscapes, such as the musique concrète drone of 1983′s Woo Lae Oak. He is also known for his extended (and often playful) sampling techniques, utilizing drawn-out loops from recordings of Japanese folk songs, American soul and pop music, and other genres. His work has been frequently commissioned for dance performances, multimedia installations, cinema festivals, radio broadcasts, and more. He has released collaborations with notable experimental musicians such as Otomo Yoshihide, Tetsu Inoue, and Alfred 23 Harth, in addition to performing with sound artist Miki Yui as Realistic Monk. Using a laptop running Max/MSP, his work has gotten denser and more energetic, with releases like 2020′s Stolen Car busy and flashy enough to strike a chord with fans of hyperpop and glitchcore.
Stone was born in Los Angeles in 1953. During the late 1960s, he played keyboards in a jazz-rock band with percussionist Z'EV. They both attended the California Institute of the Arts, where Stone studied composition under Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. He started composing electro-acoustic works using magnetic tape in 1972. He was music director of listener-supported KPFK-FM from 1978 to 1981, where he hosted his Imaginary Landscape program until the early 1990s. He also became the director of Meet the Composer/California in 1981. His first album was 1983′s Woo Lae Oak, an extended drone piece constructed from tones such as rubbed string and a blown bottle. Other pieces were issued on cassettes and compilation LPs during the decade, including experiments for digital delay and a turntable such as the Martha & the Vandellas-sampling 1983 piece “Wave-Heat.” Additional pieces were commissioned for events such as the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival and the Art of Spectacle Festival, in addition to several films, dance pieces, and radio series.
In 1992, New Albion released Mom's (like many of Stone’s works, named after a restaurant), a CD containing some of his commissioned pieces, including “Banteay Srey,” which was created for Sony PCL’s High Definition Video project Recurring Cosmos. Monogatari: Amino Argot, a remote collaboration with Otomo Yoshihide, was released by Trigram in 1994. Kamiya Bar, assembled from recordings made during a 1989 residency in Tokyo, was issued by New Tone Records in 1995. Ambient label em:t released Stone’s score to a collaboration with dancer Kuniko Kisanuki and sculptor Satoru Shoji as Carl Stone 1196. Exusiai, composed for choreographer and performer Akira Kasai, was released in 1999, the same year Stone was invited as Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center. He joined the faculty of Chukyo University’s School of Computer and Cognitive Sciences in 2001. An early adopter of Max/MSP software, he collaborated with Tetsu Inoue on the CD pict.soul, issued by software company Cycling ’74’s c74 imprint. The 2002 album Nak Won (Sonore) documented some of Stone’s laptop performances, and 2007′s Al-Noor (In Tone Music) featured live and studio recordings (including a deconstruction of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl”).
During the early 2010s, Stone frequently performed live improvisations with Alfred 23 Harth, and three albums of their collaborations were released as limited CD-Rs by Kendra Steiner Editions. Stone formed the performance duo Realistic Monk with composer/sound artist Miki Yui. Unseen Worlds, who had previously reissued Woo Lae Oak, continued exposing Stone’s work to new audiences with the well-received 2016 compilation Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties, followed two years later by Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties. The label then released his glitchy, sometimes beat-driven newer works. Himalaya and Baroo both appeared in 2019, followed in 2020 by Stolen Car, a startlingly modern-sounding set of pop reconfigurations. ~ Paul Simpson