The Press Speaks – Quotable Quotes
“Stone makes music that can hit your ear holes like a DMT flash.”
– Richard Gehr, Relix 2019
“Avant-garde computer music pioneer Carl Stone’s newest is a Max/MSP powered deep dive into unsettled dreamworld sampledelica, warping pitch-fuct pop garbles into hiccuping noise spirals and quasi-techno ethno-pop bumpers. Properly off the dial material that sounds like a plunderphonic take on the Sublime Frequencies catalog, or ABBA reworked by Oval.”– BoomKat 2022
“Veteran US electronic experimentalist Carl Stone is making some of the most purely fun music of his career….<Bojuk>is a masterful study in the recombinant and plastic nature of popular music, and way more fun than that sounds.
–Ben Beaumont-Thomas, The Guardian 2020
“Stone is still ahead of the game when it comes to his knack for discovering a world of music in a grain of sound.”
– Julian Cowley, The Wire 2019
Stolen Car celebrates the universality of music while acknowledging the singular attributes that make styles and traditions appealing, bringing us closer to a unified understanding of the power of listening.
– Jonathan Williger, Pitchfork 2020
“(Carl Stone’s Baroo is) like a dance party in a room made of funhouse mirrors.”
– Pitchfork “Best Experimental Albums of 2019”
“(Baroo and Himalaya) bubble with ideas and careen with dizzying juxtapositions….the process is brainy, but both albums are also full of glee, as fun to listen to as they are to contemplate.”
– Bandcamp “Best Experimental Albums of 2019”
“The relationship between Himalaya and Stone’s release from earlier this year, Baroo, mirrors that between Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way – the later album building on the textural and harmonic palette of all that went before, while clawing open fresh expressive possibilities…. (Stone) reconnects your soul with the stuff of sound itself as you ruminate on an epic journey, both exhilarating and affecting.”
– Philip Clark, The Wire 2019
“Read anything about Carl Stone online and you will notice people tying themselves into knots even trying to describe what his music sounds like. Here’s my try: he takes samples and does outrageous things with them using musical coding. You will hear all types of songs smashed together, stretched out, rearranged, or parodied in a way that runs through an enormous range of emotions, and along the spectrum of gorgeous to difficult. What makes him extra noteworthy is that in addition to being part of the California experimental scene while he was younger, he suddenly started putting out a torrent of daring albums while in his 60s. It’s like Scott Walker, except Carl was weird the whole time.“
– Catherine Sinow, freelance critic 2025
“The title track (Baroo) is an entrancing salsa kaleidoscope that would stimulate Steve Reich’s jealousy …a sunray piercing the black clouds and the cold fog to warm human plants whose flourishing is delayed. When you’re down and troubled – but don’t need a helping hand – it will work wonders, improving the mood much better than any antidepressant. Keep it close.”
– Massimo Ricci Touching Extremes 2019
“{Stone’s music is} a powerful stimulant, with lingering euphoric effects.”
– Steve Smith, New York Times 2010
“One of American experimental music’s most eloquent advocates”
– Time Out New York 2014
“He just opens up time in this marvelous way that I’ve never heard another composer do.”
– Jonathan Gold, Vogue Magazine 2016
“A trailblazing electronic composer and improviser whose works mix eloquence, economy and wit”
– Time Out New York 2012
Photo: Joe Elliot Purtell