Michael Stearns

Composer and sound sculptor Michael Stearns entered the world in Tucson, Arizona, where he first took up classical guitar during adolescence before shifting toward rock and jazz. By sixteen he was already performing regularly as a sideman for prominent pop attractions such as the Lovin' Spoonful and Paul Revere & the Raiders. While enrolled at the University of the Pacific he redirected his focus to electronic composition, finishing his initial musique concrète work in 1968. Four years afterward he came back to Tucson and launched a personal recording facility, soon turning out numerous advertising jingles. In 1974 choreographer Emilie Conrad persuaded him to relocate to Los Angeles as house composer for her Continuum Studio; there, crafting improvised live scores for the ensemble’s pioneering movement investigations, he forged a distinctive palette that merged synthesizers with environmental recordings and gradually embraced more unusual instruments.

Stearns issued his first album, Ancient Leaves, in 1977 on the independent Continuum Montage imprint, its space-music orientation foreshadowing the later surge of new age. Subsequent releases such as Morning Jewel and Planetary Unfolding appeared as he constructed The Beam, a twelve-foot aluminum beam fitted with roughly two dozen piano strings intended to produce deep frequencies. During 1983 he joined forces with composer Maurice Jarre on Dreamscape, the opening entry in an ongoing sequence of inventive film scores. His fifth solo outing, Lyra, was realized entirely on George Landry’s immense Lyra Sound Constellation, an apparatus containing 156 microtonally tuned strings extending as long as twenty feet. Beginning in 1984 Stearns embarked on an enduring partnership with filmmaker Ron Fricke that produced the soundtrack for the landmark IMAX film Chronos; the same year he established M’ Ocean, a studio in Santa Monica, California, which yielded a namesake album the following year.

Alongside 1986’s Plunge, Stearns rejoined Fricke for the short film Sacred Site, while scores for the IMAX productions Seasons and Time Concerto further cemented his standing among the era’s most inventive film composers, especially for his command of multi-channel Surround Sound technology. Later projects encompassed albums such as Encounter and the collaborative Desert Solitaire with Steve Roach and Kevin Braheny, plus additional IMAX soundtracks including Ring of Fire and Tropical Rain Forest; he also created audio for several attractions at Universal Studios theme park. Another Fricke collaboration yielded the widely acclaimed 1991 release Baraka, after which Stearns moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to erect Earth Turtle Studio. The joint effort Singing Stones with Ron Sunsinger appeared in 1994, followed a year later by The Lost World. The Light in the Trees arrived in 1996, and Sorcerer was issued four years afterward.