Biography
Carl Stone ranks among the earliest practitioners of sample-driven composition and real-time computer music. Splitting his time between California and Japan, he began creating electro-acoustic pieces in 1972 and shifted to laptop-based live performance in 1986. His pieces frequently elongate audio fragments into mesmerizing, gradually evolving textures, exemplified by the musique concrète drone on the 1983 album Woo Lae Oak. He has also gained recognition for his protracted, frequently playful sampling methods that stretch loops drawn from Japanese folk songs, American soul and pop recordings, and additional styles. Commissions for his music regularly arrive from dance companies, multimedia installations, film festivals, radio outlets, and related contexts. Collaborative releases have paired him with experimental figures including Otomo Yoshihide, Tetsu Inoue, and Alfred 23 Harth, while he maintains the Realistic Monk duo with sound artist Miki Yui. Working in Max/MSP on a laptop has steered his output toward denser, more propulsive results, as heard on the 2020 album Stolen Car, whose busy, glossy surfaces resonate with listeners drawn to hyperpop and glitchcore.
Born in Los Angeles in 1953, Stone played keyboards during the late 1960s in a jazz-rock ensemble alongside percussionist Z'EV. Both later studied at the California Institute of the Arts, where Stone took composition lessons from Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. Tape-based electro-acoustic composition occupied him beginning in 1972. Between 1978 and 1981 he served as music director at listener-supported KPFK-FM and continued hosting the Imaginary Landscape program there into the early 1990s. In 1981 he also assumed leadership of Meet the Composer/California. His debut album, Woo Lae Oak, appeared in 1983 as an extended drone assembled from rubbed-string tones and a blown bottle. Further works surfaced on cassettes and compilation LPs throughout the decade, among them digital-delay and turntable experiments such as the 1983 Martha & the Vandellas-sampling piece “Wave-Heat.” Additional scores were prepared for the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, the Art of Spectacle Festival, several films, dance works, and radio series.
New Albion issued Mom’s in 1992; like many of Stone’s titles, the album takes its name from a restaurant and gathers commissioned pieces, among them “Banteay Srey,” written for Sony PCL’s High Definition Video project Recurring Cosmos. The remote collaboration Monogatari: Amino Argot with Otomo Yoshihide came out on Trigram in 1994. New Tone Records released Kamiya Bar in 1995, constructed from recordings made during a 1989 Tokyo residency. Ambient imprint em:t documented Stone’s score for a project with dancer Kuniko Kisanuki and sculptor Satoru Shoji under the title Carl Stone 1196. Exusiai, created for choreographer and performer Akira Kasai, appeared in 1999, the same year Stone was named 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 Max/MSP user, he recorded the CD pict.soul with Tetsu Inoue for Cycling ’74’s c74 label. The 2002 album Nak Won on Sonore captured several laptop performances, while 2007’s Al-Noor on In Tone Music compiled both live and studio material, including a deconstruction of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”
Throughout the early 2010s Stone frequently improvised live with Alfred 23 Harth, resulting in three limited CD-R albums issued by Kendra Steiner Editions. He formed the Realistic Monk performance duo with composer and sound artist Miki Yui. Unseen Worlds, which had already reissued Woo Lae Oak, broadened Stone’s reach with the 2016 anthology Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties and followed it two years later with Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties. The label next documented his newer, glitch-oriented and occasionally beat-driven work: Himalaya and Baroo both surfaced in 2019, succeeded in 2020 by Stolen Car, a strikingly contemporary collection of pop reconfigurations. Wat Dong Moon Lek and the digital EP Gall Tones arrived in 2022.
Born in Los Angeles in 1953, Stone played keyboards during the late 1960s in a jazz-rock ensemble alongside percussionist Z'EV. Both later studied at the California Institute of the Arts, where Stone took composition lessons from Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. Tape-based electro-acoustic composition occupied him beginning in 1972. Between 1978 and 1981 he served as music director at listener-supported KPFK-FM and continued hosting the Imaginary Landscape program there into the early 1990s. In 1981 he also assumed leadership of Meet the Composer/California. His debut album, Woo Lae Oak, appeared in 1983 as an extended drone assembled from rubbed-string tones and a blown bottle. Further works surfaced on cassettes and compilation LPs throughout the decade, among them digital-delay and turntable experiments such as the 1983 Martha & the Vandellas-sampling piece “Wave-Heat.” Additional scores were prepared for the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, the Art of Spectacle Festival, several films, dance works, and radio series.
New Albion issued Mom’s in 1992; like many of Stone’s titles, the album takes its name from a restaurant and gathers commissioned pieces, among them “Banteay Srey,” written for Sony PCL’s High Definition Video project Recurring Cosmos. The remote collaboration Monogatari: Amino Argot with Otomo Yoshihide came out on Trigram in 1994. New Tone Records released Kamiya Bar in 1995, constructed from recordings made during a 1989 Tokyo residency. Ambient imprint em:t documented Stone’s score for a project with dancer Kuniko Kisanuki and sculptor Satoru Shoji under the title Carl Stone 1196. Exusiai, created for choreographer and performer Akira Kasai, appeared in 1999, the same year Stone was named 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 Max/MSP user, he recorded the CD pict.soul with Tetsu Inoue for Cycling ’74’s c74 label. The 2002 album Nak Won on Sonore captured several laptop performances, while 2007’s Al-Noor on In Tone Music compiled both live and studio material, including a deconstruction of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”
Throughout the early 2010s Stone frequently improvised live with Alfred 23 Harth, resulting in three limited CD-R albums issued by Kendra Steiner Editions. He formed the Realistic Monk performance duo with composer and sound artist Miki Yui. Unseen Worlds, which had already reissued Woo Lae Oak, broadened Stone’s reach with the 2016 anthology Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties and followed it two years later with Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties. The label next documented his newer, glitch-oriented and occasionally beat-driven work: Himalaya and Baroo both surfaced in 2019, succeeded in 2020 by Stolen Car, a strikingly contemporary collection of pop reconfigurations. Wat Dong Moon Lek and the digital EP Gall Tones arrived in 2022.
Albums
