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 fifth Different Skies. Rus will be creating the live video you will see at the concert.

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. 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 as-yet-unnamed electronic jazz project to debut this summer. Brian was also a featured soloist on Jim Combs' Sensitive Chaos CDs Leak and Emerging Transparency, and on Otso Pakarinen's CD Orange Apples. He recently performed and recorded at the Boise Experimental Music Festival. This year, Brian will perform on soprano saxophone, 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. He is not responsible for any resulting damage.

ALLEN GOODMAN Arizona native Allen Goodman has been involved with music for over 25 years. As host of Ambitar Radio on Stillstream.com Allen provides an eclectic blend from the sub-genres of ambient music. As an artist Allen releases classical/electronica/ambient under the nom de plume Desert Mystic Allen is currently working on his first full album release. Allen’s influences range from Amadeus to Zulu tribal, and the diversity of his influence show in his music. We hope to break him of his “really loud obnoxious softhsynth” habit this year, please wish us luck. This is Allen’s third year attending Different Skies.

KEVIN HALLER is a long-time Atlanta resident and will be a sophomore at Different Skies. Burning Artist(s) Sale is the moniker for the variety of artistic and musical endeavors by Kevin. Alter egos include Killer Haven, a grizzled rocker that prefers to stay in his bunker making music videos. KVpop writes catchy hooks, but is too afraid to let friends or colleagues help him put finishing touches on his compositions. K love writes music intended for dance clubs old and new, and inspired by his first DS experience is K lectronique, an ambient & experimental sound sculptor. Burning Artist occasionally performs as a solo artist, but prefers the dynamic of group interaction, as he recently did at Atlanta's City Skies Electronic Music Festival, playing with the Different Skies All Stars. Burning Artist is proud to have played at Atlanta's EYEDRUM First Thursday Open Improv for the last eight years.

GREG HURLEY is an ambient guitarist and music producer in San Diego; he is a writer for Recording Magazine, and beta tester for Magix Samplitude/Sequoia, Hotz Translator, and other music/video-related software. Originally hailing from the Cleveland progressive rock scene, Greg eventually embarked on other ventures ranging from ambient to fusion and sound design. His 1990 release 'Welcome!' reached the New Age/AC top 40. Greg's latest release'Now.Here.This' is currently in production. His nearly 30 years of electronic engineering design experience, combined with music technology development, has led to his participation in the development of new types of interactive musical interfaces. Greg will be performing for his second year after successfully filming the event in 2007.

JOHN KRIKAWA is a relative newcomer to the world of electronic ambient music and holds a special interest in the cinematic ambient and modern ambient subgenres. He also has strong leanings toward a progressive eclectic blend of new age, classical, jazz and rock instrumentation.  Krikawa's ear toward electronic music was developed in the late 70's with his introduction to the music of Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk and Jarre and later Vangelis and Kitaro.  At that time he was also an accomplished senior chorister in the Royal School of Church Music and would sometimes hide homemade oscillators in his choir robe for mischievous relief.  The musical verve followed him into the 90's when he was an active awarding-winning music composer for Video Art projects and medical documentaries.  After surviving the early years of child-rearing, he is back from sabbatical and steeped in the ambient muse under his project name Parity Flux.  2009 will mark his first year at Different Skies.

BILL MARX wants to be a drummer really badly.  Some would say he has accomplished exactly that.  Through an impressive combination of fast talking and dumb luck, he manages to situate himself around a cadre of musicians much better than himself.  Apparently this technique has also secured a him spot on the DS09 go list.  Bill regularly performs in the northeast Ohio area with groups ranging from a pops orchestra, big band jazz, and a Brazilian bateria.  He went to engineering school with DS verteran Bill Fox, and regularly hangs out with Brian Good, who introduced him to electronic and ambient music.  Bill wants to remind everyone to blame Brian if anything goes wrong.

MIKE METLAY, Founder and Coordinator of Different Skies, returns for the sixth 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 with a deliberately obscure tuning.

JONATHAN MILLS is a repeat performer at Different Skies whose idea of music changed when he heard Terry Riley's "A Rainbow in Curved Air." It was 20 years before he began to compose and perform minimalist music as a shamanic practitioner using Tibetan singing bowls, logs, rocks and Native American flute. In 2005 he bought a Roland Fantom-Xa and began a string of CDs that include ambient pieces in the Pompeii Trilogy, "21st Century Shaman," "Trainspotting," and "¿a la Frontera Sur?" among others. His most recent work, the four-disc Oncology Cycle, documents his encounter with cancer. He has played at Bloomington's Lotus Fest, the 2007 Lilly ArtsWeek Festival, and collaborates with Janiece Jaffe to create healing music. When not composing, Jonathan is a professor of computer science whose work with Rubel's extended analog computer is internationally recognized. He and his students are designing "Synthesizers in Speakers," woven analog supercomputer fabrics that reproduce music holographically. http://www.myspace.com/shamaniaq

OTSO PAKARINEN is the owner of Visual Power, an audiovisual production company / 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 quintet of albums by Ozone Player, which combine intricate electronic structure with dramatic excitement and a rare streak of broad humor. Ozone Player's latest album is Orange Apples, of which two of the songs on the CD were previewed at Different Skies 2007. 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 John Rossi III will be returning to Different Skies for the fourth time.  He has been in a coma for the past 11 months and is currently recovering from his recent brain transplant.  John hopes that recovery of his distal motor function will be sufficiently complete to allow him to play his keyboards at this year's event.  As a backup, John has mastered the art of triggering Korg M3 KARMA patterns with his nose (which all of his Italian grandparents told him would come in handy some day). At very least he will be bringing with him a nice Florida tan!

IVAN SCHWARTZ is attending his second Different Skies 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.

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.