A Produce

A Produce spent multiple years delving into trance-infused musical forms across rock and additional idioms. During the early 1980s he founded the Trance Port imprint to issue a run of cassette-only recordings that captured the expanding regional trance community. Among the nine titles, three assembled local musicians and artists active in contemporary trance music. The now-unavailable L.A. Mantra cassettes preserved the Los Angeles trance milieu of that period. By 1988 his focus shifted toward modern synthesizers and their expanded sonic range, resulting in the debut solo album The Clearing. Described by the artist as “an album of conceptual space,” the record incorporated performances from several earlier Trance Port contributors.

In 1992 came Reflect Like a Mirror, Respond Like an Echo, which, like its predecessor, resisted easy classification and fit neither the new-age nor space-rock mold. Instead the two albums fused ethno-ambient, electronic, new-age, and space-rock elements, supplying an effective setting for relaxation, reflection, or motion.

An extended three-track EP titled A Smooth Surface appeared in 1994, aimed at probing more meditative trance territory and carrying the concepts of The Clearing and Reflect Like a Mirror, Respond Like an Echo further inward. Later the same year A Produce issued Land of a Thousand Trances, his most comprehensive artistic declaration in the trance domain to that point. Several tracks feature former Trance Port musicians: processed pedal-steel artist extraordinaire Chas Smith, Harold Budd associate Ruben Garcia, and synthesist Pierre Lambow.

The fifth A Produce release, White Sands, surveyed his career in modern trance music through an anthology of selections spanning 1988–1994 drawn from the four prior albums together with scarce tracks, alternate mixes, and previously unreleased material. Both title and cover image derive from the National Monument in New Mexico, evoking the calm of a tranquil, meditative locale. One frequently aired track, “Heart of the Dunes,” takes its name from a visitor brochure distributed at the site. Even dedicated followers of earlier A Produce work encounter fresh pieces on White Sands.

The latter half of the 1990s brought Inscape & Landscape, titled after Pierre Dansareau’s 1975 volume—an out-of-print reflection on the human spirit intersecting with the then-burgeoning ecological awareness. The album offers a musical reading of those notions. “I wanted to contrast these two very different, yet similar, environments along the lines of inner and outer space of the individual,” A Produce noted. The compositions divide into “inscape” and “landscape” groupings, although several suggest an overlap of the two ideas.

A 1997 “special-edition” reissue of Reflect Like a Mirror, Respond Like an Echo followed, remastered with assistance from Robert Rich and augmented by three bonus tracks: the previously unreleased “The Marble Staircase” and “Sunstream,” plus the extended version of “A Smooth Surface” from the discontinued EP. In October 1999 A Produce delivered one of his strongest statements to date with Altara, a collaboration with Hypnos Recordings artist and founder M. Griffin. The long-gestating solo album Smile on the Void reached completion and appeared on Hypnos/Trance Port as a joint release in March 2001.