The music of the San Francisco-based composer Pauline Anna Strom, who died just before Christmas, aged 74, might be described as new age – a mystical, trance-like synthesised babble that could conceivably accompany meditation sessions or yoga classes. But Strom was a cheerfully cantankerous figure who drew from more arcane Californian sources. Listen to the music that she released in the 1980s as Trans-Millenia Consort and you can hear traces of the blissful minimalism of Terry Riley; the wobbly electronica that Stephen Hill used to play on his Hearts of Space radio show; the electro-acoustic compositions of Joanna Brouk; even the hypnotic trance music that Alice Coltrane was making in her Santa Monica ashram.
Blind from birth, Strom created aural collages filled with a sense of iridescent light and kaleidoscopic patterns. After marrying an army veteran in the 1970s, she set up a home studio, creating futuristic electronica on a four-track Tascam recorder using a DX7, a Prophet 10, a CX1, an E-mu Emulator and a rack of effects units. A slew of cassette releases earned her a small cult following, but it wasn’t until RVNG released a compilation of her 1980s work in 2017 that she came to wider international attention.
Financial difficulties had forced Strom to sell her gear in the early 90s but she slowly acquired a new digital rig in recent years. Angel Tears in Sunlight is not only her final album, but her first in three decades. It is as gloriously varied as her 1980s output. Some tracks see her taking Steve Reich-style minimalist marimba riffs but escorting them through endless harmonic mutations. Sometimes she plays ambient drones that throb gently and barely change chord; elsewhere she changes key with each beat. Temple Gardens at Midnight digitally manipulates percussion sounds and temple gongs until they sound like a white-hot shooting stars descending to earth. The Pulsation is a riot of muted drumming, with random chirrups of tuned percussion rising above an arpeggiated burble of rain forest noises. These are electronic miniatures on a symphonic scale; digital creations that conjure up visions of a pre-electric world.
Also out this month
The Bandcamp page of KMRU – a sound artist based between Berlin and Nairobi, AKA Joseph Kamaru – is always worth checking out for ambient textures. His latest, Falling Dreams, is like a piece of distorted thrash metal slowed down to a coma pace until it gently pulsates. Uma Elmo (ECM) is a collection of limpid ambient jazz, where Danish guitarist Jakob Bro, Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen and drummer Jorge Rossy seem to be daring each other to make as little sound with their instruments as possible, instead painting impressionistic watercolours in acres of space. Another very different ECM release is Hallgató, a terrific collaboration between veteran Hungarian guitarist Ferenc Snétberger and András Keller’s string quartet that takes us through six centuries of music – from sweet settings of John Dowland’s compositions for lute to modernist classics by Shostakovich and Samuel Barber, alongside some darkly elegant pieces by Snétberger himself.
