DARRELL BURGAN, an electronic/ambient artist better known for music projects Palancar, Copal River, and Cluster Balm, returns to Different Skies in 2007. Darrell is very active in the space music community, being the person behind ambient net radio station StillStream, as well as behind the boutique music labels Blue Water Records and Earth Mantra Netlabel. In addition to all that, he also is the brains behind Spirit Canyon Audio, creators of the world's most sick and bent impulse responses for convolution reverbs. He also manages to somehow spend time with his wife and four children. Darrell promises not to get too excited on stage, so as to avoid embarrassing the other musicians.

JIM COMBS is a solo ambient musician who works with audio and MIDI looping devices under the name of Sensitive Chaos. The first Sensitive Chaos CD entitled Leak was deemed one of the twelve best CDs of 2006 by Bill Binkelman of the New Age Reporter and is receiving airplay in 2007 from industry heavyweights including Public Radio International's Echoes (145 stations across the U.S.), Soma FM's Space Station Soma and Cliqhop idm, WWSP, WXDU, WUSM, WTUL, KRFC, WETX, WVKR WDIY, and KTUH. Sensitive Chaos performs regularly in the Southeast US. Jim was also one half of the Atlanta-based electronic duo TouchXtone. TouchXtone's last two album releases, entitled Astroboy and headmiX, are a fascinating mixture of traditional space music and soundscapes with modern rhythmic and dance styles. 2007 is Jim's fourth 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 2007, having been at the 2003, 2005, and 2006 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 fourth Different Skies. Rus will be performing primarily on guitar and stringed instrument this time, with requisite signal processing all around. No digital pads or other devices that one would otherwise strike with a stick. The only rhythmic content hell be producing will be coming from hardware...such as an Electribe, or rackmount MIDI percussion module, etc. He'll have a secondary and lesser focus on softsynths and assorted audio plugins via computer and MIDI keyboard. And he'll still have his trusty didjeridoo...again, with requisite processing.

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?

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. Brian was also a featured soloist on Jim Combs' Sensitive Chaos CD. 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.

ALLEN GOODMAN is a Phoenix native, an ambient artist with varied influences and styles; he currently hosts Ambitar Radio, a weekly live net radio show on stillstream.com. Allen is relatively new to the ambient scene however we are looking forward to his upcoming release “Angels & Demons.” This will be Allen’s first year at Different Skies.

DAVID HERPICH returns to Different Skies this year, after a fruitful first attendance last year. Dave 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 recently completed 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 years.

JOE MCMAHON is a first-timer at this year's Different Skies, but has been a musician for a long time. His first exposure to electronic music was the soundtrack from "A Clockwork Orange", after which it was only a matter of time before he started doing synthesis himself. He has recorded with Team Metlay, has released a solo CD ranging from e-jazz to new age to pure electronic noise. His musical influences are all over the map, from Stockhausen to Synergy, and Don Ellis to Brian Eno, with a side order of gamelan; his newest CD, "Ocean Music", combines all of these influences into his own brand of ambient. He'll be playing his trusty Ensoniq SD-1, his favored instrument since 1990, plus assorted sonic strangeness from his laptop. He currently lives in Silicon Valley.

MIKE METLAY, Founder and Coordinator of Different Skies, returns for the fifth 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

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 over 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; most recently as part of the Fulton Reaves Project, 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 will be making his second appearance at Different Skies. John first became involved in electronic music in 1972, and in 1973 acquired Synthi-AKS and EML-101 synthesizers and learned subtractive synthesis and sequencing. In 1975, 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 was born. In 1985, 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. Most recently, he appeared in concert last spring with Mike and fellow Different Skies alumnus Bill Fox at Mind3Spiral. He spends his creative time developing electronic music for the DTS 5.1 format in his CrystaLogic Productions studio in Florida.

IVAN SCHWARTZ will attend Different Skies for his first time this year, providing sound reinforcement and mixing for the event. He has worked in the professional audio industry for the past twenty years, and has been mixing live sound since the late 1970's. A closet electronic musician, Ivan spent his adolescent years learning synthesis on an Arp 2500 and Emu modular at the local university. He also owns Rudy's Lair, a Seattle-area project studio for tracking, mixing, mastering, and electronic music composition. Rudy the RackCat, General Manager of Rudy's Lair, will be unable to attend Different Skies this year due to previous laptop performance and napping commitments.

CHRISTOPHER SHORT (short@recordingmag.com) is the guitarist for the space music group Ma Ja Le'. He is also a composer/sound designer/engineer working in the Milwaukee area. He returns to Different Skies after a two year hiatus while he figured out how to avoid carrying around the small refrigerator sized guitar rig he had last time he was at the festival. This year he will be carrying a significantly smaller rig! Check out his latest music projects at www.myspace.com/cosmicdreamscapes.

TIM THOMPSON is a software engineer who enjoys the creative process of developing artistic software for both music and visuals, often involving the use of unusual controllers. Most widely known as the developer of the KeyKit programming environment for algorithmic and realtime MIDI experimentation, he has more recently been inspired by events such as Burning Man and Woodstockhausen, where his interactive creations include a 12-foot high lyre and an antique radio. He lives in Silicon Valley and collaborates with local ensembles dud and DOUBLE VISION. Tim's home page documents the variety of his activities and allows people to play with some web-based algorithmic music toys. In his first Different Skies participation, Tim will be focused on creating visuals in realtime with multitouch controllers.

PAUL VNUK JR. is an audio engineer and the other half of the electronic space music duo Ma Ja Le. He has also worked with space music pioneers Vir Unis and James Johnson, and has released a beautiful ambient solo album entitled Silence Speaks In Shadow. He plays not only keyboards and traditional Third World instruments but also is an accomplished percussionist, working with Arabic, African, and Indian percussion, kit drums, and electronic percussion devices. Paul will be performing with compact digital modular synthesizers, and with sensitive electronic percussion devices that are designed to interact closely with drum technique. He will also do a lot of standing around trying to figure out when to jump in, which is fine - if he played all the time, no one else would get a note in edgewise.

TIM WALTERS is a San Francisco experimental musician whose many projects are brought together under the realm of the Doubtful Palace. He has created dense processed electronic soundscapes in his solo albums The Dry Well and Lost Continents, performed electroacoustic improvisation with Circular Firing Squad, recorded unusual children's music for adults in Slaw, and twiddled bits with Shalmaneser. Tim has based his entire music production system for Different Skies on an Apple laptop computer running the powerful SuperCollider music creation language. As a result, when he is not playing woodwinds or bass, he will look like he's doing his taxes. He believes this is better than the Happy Finn Dance.

DOUG WELLINGTON is a bass player and electronic musician based in Tucson. He'll be playing his bass along with a couple synthesizers and maybe some percussion toys. In 2004 Doug returned at literally the last minute as a walk-on bass player for the final jams. More info on Doug at DougWellington.com.

SPECIAL GUEST: GREG HURLEY is an ambient guitarist and music producer in San Diego; he recently began working for Recording Magazine as a writer, with Magix Samplitude as his 'beat'. Greg will film the proceedings in hi-def for documentary purposes. Say cheeze!

SPECIAL GUEST: FRED BECKER is a successful American space musician whose solo albums _Inner, Stellar_ and _Enterphase_ did quite well on their release. He is also a member of the as-yet-unreleased trio that calls itself Conduits. Fred will be helping out with merch sales, ushering, etc., during the show itself.

SPECIAL GUEST: DEAN DeBENEDICTIS is also a member of the as-yet-unreleased trio that calls itself Conduits. Fred will be helping out with merch sales, ushering, etc., during the show itself.

SPECIAL GUEST: JOHN DUMITRU is also a member of the as-yet-unreleased trio that calls itself Conduits. Fred will be helping out with merch sales, ushering, etc., during the show itself.