David Kristian

Based in Montreal, David Kristian has reached deep into the origins of electronic music to fuse his interests in soundtrack composition and experimental sound design. The first entirely electronic film score, Louis and Bebe Barron’s 1956 Forbidden Planet, prompted him to create the 1997 album Cricklewood as an homage to the Barrons’ pioneering techniques. His recording work started in the early 1980s at a cable-television station in New Brunswick, where he began crafting original scores for science-fiction and animation shorts using tape loops and analogue experiments rooted in 1950s science-fiction aesthetics.

Although he kept recording through the rest of the decade, his debut album Synaesthesia did not appear until 1994 on Discreet/Indiscreet. Despite the album’s straightforward rhythmic approach, Kristian’s attention remained centered on experimental production methods. The EPs Clubfoot and Ectopic Beat signaled a growing interest in drum’n’bass that attracted listeners in the techno scene. He answered that development with the largely beatless Cricklewood, issued on Alien8. Kristian has also collaborated with Toronto’s Gregory De Rocher, known as Lowfish, and issued the remix collection Woodworking.