Different Skies 2006 Participants

DARRELL BURGAN has his fingers in many pies, as you'll see in the five lines of URLs in his email signature! His musical projects include Palancar and Cluster Balm, which I'd describe as, erm, noisy space ambient; he is known to me on a professional level as being the brains behind Spirit Canyon Audio, creators of the world's most sick and bent impulse responses for convolution reverbs.

JIM COMBS is both a solo ambient musician who works with audio and MIDI looping devices and one half of the Atlanta-based electronic duo TouchXtone. TouchXtone's latest two album releases, entitled Astroboy and headmiX, are a fascinating mixture of traditional space music and soundscapes with modern rhythmic and dance styles. 2006 is Jim's third Different Skies, and he continues to bring a powerful drive to carry the event forward in growth and success. Jim will be playing a portable keyboard rig based on a custom made Sequentix P3 analog sequencer and various hardware synthesizer and processing modules. He believes history tends to repeat itself with variation, and attempts to make music that follows the same footsteps.

JOHN DUVAL is returning to Different Skies in 2006, having been at the 2003 and 2005 events, but missing 2004. John has contributed modular synthesis textures to albums by Dweller At The Threshold and to his solo CD Hell's Canyon; in recent years he has returned to his first love, the electric guitar, and has played space guitar at live concerts by mindSpiral. John lives in Portland, Oregon, and will be playing guitar at this year's show, combined with just enough rack gear to give him something to hide behind.

RUSSELL FOSTER is a Phoenix native, a solo electronic artist who creates ambient music with a tribal edge under the name Una Voce. His album Provenance will be among several of his creations available for sale at the show. Rus has over twenty years' experience as a guitarist, drummer, and keyboardist, and brings an exceptional artistic sensibility to this, his third Different Skies. Rus will be performing on keyboards, guitars, and electronic percussion. He has promised not to smack any other performers that sneak over to steal a hit or two.

BILL FOX is one of the most influential people in the world electronic community. A tireless promoter of the genre in the Northeastern United States, he runs three radio broadcasts of electronic and modern progressive music on two radio stations, which can be heard on streaming Internet radio at WMUH and WDIY. His home page is soundscapes.us/bill. A multi-instrumentalist who's equally at home on guitar, bass, saxophone, and keyboards, he has lent his talents to the Ricochet Dreams albums as well as to a collaboration with world-famous space musician VidnaObmana, and he plays in a number of musical groups in eastern Pennsylvania, including Xeroid Entity, who performed at the electro-music 2005 festival. Bill is concentrating on guitars this year, with electric guitar and Hawaiian lap steel being treated by electronic processing to create otherworldly tones. Bill makes use of looping echo devices to accompany himself and build up thick textures of guitar music. As a result of this technique, any mistakes Bill makes will be repeated for quite a while, so he'd best be careful, hadn't he?

DAVE FULTON is returning to Different Skies in 2006, having also been at the 2003 and 2005 events, but missing 2004. Dave is is best known as part of the group Dweller at the Threshold, which has released two albums: No Boundary Condition (1996) and Generation/Transmission/Illumination(1998) and their third album Ouroborus was released on Hypnos/Binary in 2001. Recently, Fulton collaborated with Hypnos founder & Viridian Sun member, Mike Griffin. Their first CD titled The Most Distant Point Known was released on Hypnos in 2000, and its follow-up Imprint came out in 2002.

TONY GERBER is returns to Different Skies this year after his wonderful contributions in Different Skies 2005. He was mesmerized by electronic music in 1971, after playing with an SWTP theremin and hearing the classic "Switched on Bach". Like many young synthesizer explorers during the 70s he built his own PAIA synth when he was 14 years old. However, guitar is his main instrument, but he became a multi-instrumentalist over the years with an emphasis on synth sound creation. In 1986, he founded the performance collective Space for Music which spawned multimedia performances combining film, video, dance, and electronic music. SFM was turned into a website in 1996 and then into a record label in 2000 (spaceformusic.com). In 1997, he founded the well-known space music group, Spacecraft, with fellow synth lover and musician, John Rose, after solo releases on the Lektronic Soundscapes label. Combining his solo releases and SPACECRAFT recordings there are over 20 CDs available. Some of these recordings are with fellow Different Skies performer and friend, Giles Reaves. He first experienced Arcosanti in the early 1990s while recording an album in Phoenix. Gerber has been a driving force in the art and space music arena during his 25 year stay in Nashville, TN. He is very excited to participate in the Different Skies experience for the first time this year. His own web site is http://spaceformusic.com/tonygerber.html

BRIAN GOOD hails from northern Ohio and has been a quiet but pervasive force in the Internet electronic music community for over twenty years. An award-winning jazz woodwind player, he has performed at clubs and festivals across the US and Europe, notably the Montreux Jazz Festival. While his interest in electronic music dates back to his school days, he avoided active involvement until he discovered wind synthesizers. These days he alternates traditional jazz dates with experiments in electronic noise, processing acoustic saxophone as well as electronic instruments. His current projects include ambient collaborations Sundagger and Aether Drift, and an irregular but ongoing avant-klang effort, Broken Symmetry, recently performing with Tim Walters. This year, Brian will play a variety of acoustic woodwinds, as well as the Akai Electronic Wind Instrument, an extraordinary machine that translates the nuances of saxophone playing, including the breathing of the artist, into electronic signals that can control synthesizers directly. The results range from exquisite to merely sick; value judgments as to which is which are being left to the audience.

DAVID HERPICH new to Different Skies this year, is a composer and electronic musician balancing dual interests in classical and new age music genres. He holds degrees in music theory and composition from the University of Kansas, and is currently pursuing his master's degree as a recipient of the University Graduate Fellowship Award at the University of South Florida. Since the early 1990s he has been making electronic music of all sorts, most recently under the name Emerald Adrift. Different Skies alumnus Tim Walters has made some of Emerald Adrift’s tracks available to the hordes of imaginary fans via the Doubtful Palace, a tasty little sonic café you can visit anytime here.

JEFF KUNZELMAN Growing up in rural Wisconsin Jeff's first exposure to space music was through reruns of BBC's Doctor Who on PBS and NPR's Music From the Hearts of Space. After delving into using computers to produce music for a number of years, Jeff has switched to using analog instruments for more a more tactile experience. He often perfoms using electronic music and digital video under the name Alpha60. Jeff was discovered by Different Skies while he was living at Arcosanti and provided the poster artwork for the first 3 year.

MIKE METLAY, Founder and Coordinator of Different Skies, returns for the fourth year of the event he birthed (after incredible labor pains) in 2003. Mike's first experiments in collaborative space music resulted the trilogy of CDs by Team Metlay; his efforts now are concentrated both at Different Skies and in his small-group collaborations under the mindSpiral banner. At this year's show, Mike may be playing a keyboard or two, but plans a heavy emphasis on the aebea, a baritone electric string instrument witha deliberately obscure tuning.

DENNIS MOSER is a librarian and archivist whose research specialty is in the recording and preservation of modern performance art, the process of its creation as well as the end results, for future study. Dennis is also an electronic guitarist who records music under the name "/usr/sbin", and has been chatting with me about how he runs his guitar synthesizer through four Lexicon Vortex effects processors to achieve unique sounds.

OTSO PAKARINEN is the owner of Visual Power, a music label in Helsinki, Finland. Otso has been releasing music of one form or another since the 1980s, as a soloist and with the Finnish electropop group Tapa Paha Tapa. His latest project is a trio of albums by Ozone Player, which combine intricate electronic structure with dramatic excitement and a rare streak of broad humor. Ozone Player's fourth album is Frozen Paint On Boiling Canvas. Otso will be creating electronic sounds entirely from software running on a laptop computer. This system allows an entire music studio to be compacted to the size of one small box, requiring only a keyboard to play the virtual instruments. Otso will also, despite dire threats from the other performers, do the Happy Finn Dance at random points in the performance.

GILES REAVES has been producing solo albums for almost two decades, starting with Wunjo in 1986. His album Sea Of Glass reached #11 on the Billboard Magazine New Age Charts when it was released in 1992. Giles lives and works between Nashville, TN, and Salt Lake City, UT, where he is a well-respected audio engineer as well as a first-call keyboardist and percussionist; he has appeared on several albums by the Nashville-based electronic music collective SPACECRAFT (as well as countless others), and most recently he played the Alfa Centauri festival in the Netherlands with Dave Fulton and Paul Vnuk Jr. His website is at www.spaceformusic.com/gilesreaves.html and also at www.recordingcollective.com. Giles will be quietly sitting at his keyboard, which will erupt with everything from traditional instruments to a full brass section to a rock'n'roll drum kit, changing abruptly from sound to sound throughout the evening. Sometimes the sounds he chooses will even go with what everyone else is playing!

JOHN ROSSI III first became involved in electronic music when he and Tony Rodham (Hillary’s brother) turned a Radio Shack 8-Track cartridge recorder into a variable frequency oscillator (using a feedback loop) in their dorm room in 1972. In 1973 he acquired Synthi-AKS and EML-101 synthesizers and learned subtractive synthesis and sequencing. In early 1975, while attending McGill university in Montreal, John teamed up with Pascal Languirand (a.k.a. TransX) and Pierre Benard to form a trio that played and recorded electronic/space music in Pascal’s studio. Session players would frequently enter the mix and by late 1975 the Zap Jam idiom (a technique in which all musicians participating in the jam listen to what’s going on and add something constructive to the “happening”) was formalized. In Jan 1977, John entered graduate school at Bowling Green, where he formed the band Coitus (later Afterglow) who developed “songs” using the Zap Jam technique, and played original-only shows in the Lake Erie area. In 1985 Dr. Rossi entered the Navy and helped develop the Submarine Psychoacoustics Laboratory at the Navy lab in Groton CT.. With ARPAnet access, he became a member of pre-internet newsgroups and email lists that were also frequented by Mike Metlay. The two met in 1989, and soon thereafter John became a regular in Mike’s band Team Metlay, and appears on each of their 3 CD releases. He now spends his creative time developing electronic music for the DTS 5.1 format in his CrystaLogic Productions studio in Florida.

NICK ROTHWELL is currently based in London, England. His professional recording and performance project, known as CASSIEL, has been creating live electronic music for modern dance for over fifteen years, first as a duet with space musician Glyn Lloyd-Jones and then as a solo act. Nick has also co-produced and performed on all three Team Metlay albums. Nick has worked with dance companies all over England and Scotland as well as with the Frankfurt Ballett, in Vienna, and in Istanbul, Paris, Zurich, and Tokyo. His debut solo album Listen/Move was released on Atomic City in 1998. Nick is returning for his 2nd Different Skies, having attended in 2004. His music rig is based around custom computer software that translates simple control movements into complex and beautiful musical gestures, completely controlled by the artist but extrapolating his movements into ideas not playable by human hands. So it only looks like he's not actually doing anything. Really.

GREG WALTZER participates in a number of musical projects in and around Philadelphia and southern New Jersey: Mutation Vector, Xeroid Entity, Holosphere, and Fringe Element. These groups team Greg with area musicians James Lacey, Bill Fox, Howard Moscovitz, Jose (JEM) Murcia, and Michael Victor. He has most recently appeared on Xeroid Entity's CD "Live at the Deer Head Inn". Learn more at gregwaltzer.com/egw/music.htm. Greg plans to spend the entire program hunched carefully over his keyboards, turning knobs and making evil noises. He has a homemade device that looks like a steel shoebox with bad acne sitting atop his keyboard rig; if he reaches for it, the audience are advised to take a hint from the other players on stage and grab hold of anything that won't move when the blast wave hits.

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