QOQEQA digs into his afro-peruvian and andean roots with debut Axuxa, Lava La Rue drops their highly-anticipated EP, and Pauline Anna Strom’s final album is a quiet storm
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2021 was supposed to cement the renaissance of Pauline Anna Strom. The electronic music composer originally self-released her music in the early 1980s, though it never resonated far outside the New Age cottage industry. Her music wasnât enough to cover her rent in the San Francisco Tenderloin District, so Strom sold off all of her equipment by decadeâs end, becoming a Reiki master instead. In the intervening years, the blind-since birth composerâs idiosyncratic approach to synthesizer-based musicâintuitive, asymmetrical, destabilizingâresonated with a new generation of explorers. Thanks in part to her inclusion on 2017âs much needed compendium
Pauline Anna Strom, who expanded synth music s color palette in the 1980s, died in December at 74. The posthumous album em Angel Tears in Sunlight /em , out Feb. 19, is her first in over 30 years.
On the cover of Pauline Anna Strom s 1982 debut, a Dali-esque eye hatches from a skyborn egg, framed by a rainbow wrapped around the cosmos. The image, painted by Richard Karma Moffett, sits against a plateau of perfect white; ornate calligraphic text is superimposed at the top and bottom, powder blue like the atmosphere. Like that visual introduction, the alias under which Strom recorded, Trans-Millenia Consort, instantly conveyed the epoch-spanning otherness of the Bay Area synthesist s instrumental space music. Initially, it took the form of mellow waves and pulses, evocative soundscapes with titles like Emerald Pool. The sonics would grow sharper and more discordant, but her work never strayed from its freewheeling take on memory and consciousness, always committed to exploding th
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