Category Archives: Recordings

NEW CARL STONE REMIX for “8 Automated Works”, the first full release by Componium Ensemble (Visible Cloaks) out Oct 17 2025

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Coming October 17th, “8 Automated Works”, the first full release by Componium Ensemble, an “indeterminate chamber music” ensemble helmed by Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks, featuring a special CARL STONE remix available only in the CD version. .

More information and to order:

emrecords.bandcamp.com

https://emrecords.shop-pro.jp/?pid=187793310

New Release: CARL STONE and KEN IKEDA Live in Tokyo

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┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
ARTIST : CARL STONE and KEN IKEDA
TITLE : Oaken Tides
LABEL : mykesrhiza
FORMAT : CASSETTE (Includes download code）

Side A AUGUST　38’46”
Side B JANUARY 33’46”
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Pre-orders and previews are available at capricious records, to which mykesrhiza belongs.

To Order go to:
http://capricious-records.com/?pid=186944466

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The powerful old oak tree symbolizes ancient wisdom and a deep connection with nature, while the tidal currents evoke not only the ebb and flow of the tide but also the ebb and flow of time and emotions, which can be gentle or violent.

CARL STONE and KEN IKEDA
The duo show recordings by STONE and IKEDA at KNOCK Koenji in Tokyo Japan on 20 January 2024 and 17 August 2024 were mixed and mastered by Carl Stone himself, and the sound was finally mastered by Mr Isao Kumano, a representative of Phonon|, an audio equipment manufacturer known for its high quality headphones.

BoomKat Reviews Wat Dong Moon Lek

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Boomkat Product Review:

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.

‘Wat Dong Moon Lek’ might be the oddest missive we’ve heard yet from Stone. The Californian computer music vanguard has long been notable for his dissections of electronics, minimalism, world music and hip-hop, and this latest set melts his history into a barely discernible soup of chattering drums, veiled vocals and stuttered melodies. “Stone ‘plays’ his source material in the way Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ ‘plays’ an ensemble,” reads the press release – and it’s not far off the mark. There’s a freewheeling charm and humor to Stone’s approach that’s hard not to love, it’s uncompromising and deliciously bonkers, but struck thru with a level of knuckle-crack’d expertise that lifts it a few inches from the ground at all times.

At its best, ‘Wat Dong Moon Lek’ sounds like a shortwave radio interrupting a skipping J-pop CD: almost aggrevatingly loopy but texturally inviting at the same time. And while the music is assisted and driven by software, it sounds organic and human, as if Stone is answering the ubiquitous algorithmic playlist age with an arched eyebrow and a double helping of glitchy mischief. Whether you’re into John Oswald, Farmers Manual, DJ Screw or Steve Reich, this one’s for you.

bit.ly/3haHfeR

Out now: Carl Stone – We Jazz Reworks, Vol. 2

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We Jazz Records presents the second volume of their reworks albums dealing with source material from the Helsinki-based label’s catalog. This time around, it’s Carl Stone’s turn to tackle the source albums at hand and filter the label’s output through his musical lens.

We Jazz Reworks is an idea that repurposes some of the label’s output 10 albums at a time. That is, the label invites producers whose music they love on board, and one by one, they tackle 10 albums worth of source material, of which they are free to use as much or as little as they choose. The series evolves chronologically, so this volume being number two, the source material is pulled from We Jazz LPs numbers 11 through 20. The artist has complete freedom.

Volume 2 in the series happens with Carl Stone, a legendary figure in creative music. His career spans decades of unlimited musical innovation. Stone’s recent output on Unseen Worlds, the label who has also been instrumental in issuing some of his remarkable earlier work, ranks among the most original art of our time and renders notions such as “genre” virtually meaningless.

Here, We Jazz originals by Terkel Nørgaard, OK:KO, Jonah Parzen-Johnson and more are met here with a fresh sense of discovery, spun around and delivered ready for the turntable once again.

Carl Stone says:

“It was wonderful that We Jazz gave me carte blanche to work with any materials from the set of ten releases in its catalog. This freedom to work with everything could have been a mixed blessing though, as it could be a challenge to try to deal with so much musical information. In the end I did what I almost always do: Let my intuition be my guide and to seize upon any musical items that seemed to fit into an overall approach.”

“To make a new piece I usually start with an extended period of what really is just playing, the way a child plays with toys. Experimentation without necessary expectation, leading to (hopefully) discovery of things of musical interest, then figuring out a way to craft and shape these into a structured piece of music. Each track uses a different approach, which I found along the way during this play period.”

This conceptual approach becomes complete with the design, in which album graphics are treated in a similar fashion, reworking what’s there. This time around, the artwork is reinvented by Tuomo Parikka, a regular cover collage contributor for the We Jazz Magazine.

CURACAO BLUE TRANSPARENT VINYL, INSIDE OUT SLEEVE, OBI W/ LINER NOTES, PRINTED INNER SLEEVE WITH SOURCE ALBUM DESIGN REFLECTIONS.


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Now On Sale – Listen Here

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There’s a dizzying good new @carlstone album coming on May 20; it’s no spoiler to say that admirers of Stone’s jumpy digital pop fantasias should not hesitate.  – Steve Smith, Night After Night

Wat Dong Moon Lek is Stone’s latest distinctive, Characterful, and playful take on sound collage, a followup equal to 2020’s thrilling Stolen Car…There is an infinite quality to the work…much alchemy here, each track feeling fizzy and alive with potential directions. There are so many moments that make me want to dance, or stand up and applaud. It’s clever, effervescent and gloriously fun. – The Wire, June 2022 issue

https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/wat-dong-moon-lek

 

 

New Album Preorder Switched ON – Listen Here

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New Carl Stone album coming soon! The We Jazz label in Finland turned Carl loose in their archives for some of his patented sampling psychosis. Carte blanche y’all! The release is a curacao blue transparent vinyl edition. Inside out matte sleeve, corner OBI with liner notes, inner sleeve with source album design reflections.
Your order of We Jazz Reworks Vol. 2. gets you 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released in October.

Full Review of HIMALAYA in The Wire’s December 2019 Issue

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Carl Stone made the wise decision to split his latest creations over several releases.

Carl Stone Himalaya Unseen Worlds CD/DL/2xLP

 

It takes 35 minutes to reach the summit of Carl Stone’s new Himalaya. To arrive there, you ascend through manically cut up and overlaid Afrobeats, funk and hiphop grooves together with a tasty disco riff that reassembles the very molecules of your being. Then, having hit the apex, Stone throws you into idyllic freefall for the next half hour, into a balmy environment of slow moving and ethereal tones, music that is as voluminous and prayer-like as the opening part is compacted and hedonistic.

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. The opening piece “Han Yan” tells you what to expect as high-speed Afrobeats hallucinate on their own existence. Musically, two things are happening. Stone has the beats on intense fast-forward, while little microedits snip out crucial supporting notes in the harmony, which spins the music relentlessly forwards – it has no brakes.

A strutting rock beat kick-starts “Bia Bia” before it lurches towards ebullient chaos, with broken-up trumpet fanfares randomly puncturing the texture like Lester Bowie is wandering in and out of earshot. “Kikanbou” is grounded by a mesmeric disco beat that keeps rolling for 17 minutes, a motor around which auxiliary beats circle. Around the six minute mark, and for no other reason than he can, Stone suddenly turns everything upside down and inside out, and upside out and downside up, leaving beats coiling in other directions and soaring upwards. The world’s pop music has become putty in Stone’s hands. Each piece could, in theory, keep reassembling its particles infinitely. But Stone applies his composerly voice with a noticeably light touch, making conscious decisions about his material without ever suffocating its freedom.

Had he signed off after “Kikanbou” Himalaya would still have been exceptional, but the final glide through spacious textures and rarefied tunings – leading towards intonations from the Japanese vocalist Akaihirume – reconnects your soul with the stuff of sound itself as you ruminate on an epic journey, both exhilarating and affecting.

Philip Clark

The Wire December 2019

The Wire’s review of Himalaya, my latest release

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Happy to report, The Wire’s review of Himalaya, my latest release, is pretty much a rave.


Excerpt: It takes 35 minutes to reach the summit of Carl Stone’s new Himalaya. To arrive there, you ascend through manically cut up and overlaid Afrobeats, funk and hiphop grooves together with a tasty disco riff that reassembles the very molecules of your being. Then, having hit the apex, Stone throws you into idyllic freefall for the next half hour, into a balmy environment of slow moving and ethereal tones, music that is as voluminous and prayer-like as the opening part is compacted and hedonistic.
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.

You can read the entire review here, or of course in The Wire’s December 2019 issue.

BANDCAMP:

https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/himalaya

https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/baroo

APPLE MUSIC

https://music.apple.com/us/album/himalaya/1473870763

https://music.apple.com/us/album/baroo/1452006426

Two Releases Now Out on Unseen Worlds

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Two albums just released on CD. HIMALAYA, the newest of them (featuring title track with @akaihirume), is now out on CD and DIGITAL formats. BAROO joins the physical realm today on CD, as well. Both HIMALAYA and BAROO have delicious vinyl platters forthcoming. Please enjoy this first course… artwork by Sam Lubicz

“Stone makes music that can hit your ear holes like a DMT flash.”
– Richard Gehr, Relix

“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

“It’s another hall of mirrors but this time, its every surface is in a packed lysergic night club. Strings stretched, fragments jackhammer, and thick synthetic arcs swarm….Stone is on fire here” – John J Nicol, Obladada

https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/himalaya
https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/baroo

Latest Release Gets Picked by The Wire as Best Album of the Year 2016 (Archival Category)

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wire-magazine-rewind-2016

“West Coast composer Carl Stone was one of the first to plug in to the possibilities of digital synthesizers, samplers and effects. Electronic Music included “Shibucho”, an audacious sample flip of The Temptations’ My Girl that connects Steve Reich’s Come Out to Chicago footwork, and two explorations of the possibilities of the Buchla synth. Julian Cowley said “While Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were flamboyantly promoting sample based hip-hop, and Joh Oswald was openly flaunting the art of plunderphonics, Carl Stone developed his own idiosyncratic take on sonic bricolage.”

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Boomkat Loves Our New Release and Makes Us Laugh Telling Us So

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“lights up our pleasure centres like a quid in a fruit machine, using a palette of eastern-tuned scales, processed vocals and pop samples to conjure a majorly playful array of idiosyncratic, angular and intriguing arrangements that resonate with Robert Ashley’s mercurial cut-ups as much as The Automatics Group’s incisive dance pop detournements and the proto-glitch music of Nicolas Collins. 

It’s all totally new to us and feels like somebody just opened a big skylight onto our listening lives, flooding us with new sensations between the baroque computer music of Sukhothai (1977) and the wormholing drone of Chao Praya (1973), taking in the soothingly ethereal Shing Kee (1986) and strobing structure of Don II Jang (1982), along with the haunting nocturnal transition of Kuk Il Kwan (1981) to lay out whole new worlds before your ears.”

You can read the full review here

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Our Latest Release Score’s Bandcamp’s “Best of Contemporary Classical” November 2016

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“This astounding anthology collects two-and-a-half hours of the early electronic experiments of Carl Stone, an L.A. composer who studied under Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and worked with Buchla synthesizers back in the ‘70s before finding his true passion: a kind of experimental sampling approach that presaged the developments of folks like John “Plunderphonics” Oswald and Paul Lansky. There are a couple of those early analog synth pieces—thick, long tone drones—made as a student at Cal Arts, included, but the real thrills come from the sample-based work. Stone’s work relied on tape machines, building layer after layer of the same passage of music—like the minute or so of Renaissance harpsichord music in “Sukothai” that folds in on itself until there are 1024 simultaneous layers of the music piled up, and rhythms disappear in a buzzing haze of abstract sound. Towards the end of 1982, he began working with the now-primitive Publison stereo digital delay unit to create dizzying hall-of-mirrors refractions built from tiny fragments of Asian pop, American R&B and classical records that he manipulated with a maniacal rigor to generate sound profiles that drifted toward fleeting recognizability—such as the lick of “My Girl” in “Shibucho”—before pushing off into different chopped-up patterns. Today’s technology could tackle these time-consuming time experiments with ease, but Stone’s resourcefulness and originality is unmistakable, and these sounds remain fresh decades later.”

Bandcamp is a global community where millions of fans discover new music, and directly connect with and fairly compensate the artists who make it. Their mission is to provide all artists with a sustainable platform to distribute their music, while making it easy for fans to directly support the artists they love. This review is from the Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: November 2016 listings

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Textura Reviews Our New 3-LP Release

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“The only prosaic thing about Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties is its title. Otherwise, the eight pieces (one a digital-only bonus) on this three-LP collection of pioneering work by American electro-acoustic composer Carl Stone constitute an oft-mesmerizing two-and-a-half hours; in fact, of the seven album tracks, five are so extensively explored they each take up a full album side. What makes the release especially significant for students of electronic music’s history and development is that all are previously unpublished pieces, the sole exception being “Shing Kee,” which surfaced on a 1992 New Albion CD release.”

Full review here

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Pitchfork Weighs In With One of the First Reviews of Our 3-LP Set

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“Stunning indeed, full of purring drones that at first appear to hardly be moving, only to have them slowly slide and reveal infinite amounts of overtones. It’s evocative of some of my favorite minimal music from this era.

“By-turns lovely, prickly, meditative, and maddening, these eight extended compositions (some two and a half hours of music) showcase drastically different sides of Stone’s work, which previously was relegated to small batch cassette releases in the ’80s and early ’90s. An early adopter of the computer, which he used to create his pieces, Stone’s also worked with turntables and manically manipulated samples. He has electronically elongated source sounds until they take on entirely new topographies. These techniques anticipated later trends of all sorts, from the dense slivers of samples informing the Bomb Squad’s productions to Plunderphonic’s trash-compacting of pop music to Justin Bieber 800% Slower.

From Andy Beta, published October 1 2016. You can read the complete review here

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