“The new pieces have all been developed over the last year while I have been in Japan. While the influence of being here is undeniable it also seems somehow intangible and elusive. The amazing sound world of Tokyo has found its way into my head, if not into my musical materials directly. As before, all the works are sample-based, but unlike much of my earlier work, the sources are often cloaked and transformed beyond recognition. The gestures are smaller, the textures detailed and with a certain grain.” – Carl Stone writing from Japan, July 2002.
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today”. He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between San Francisco and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. He has composed electro-acoustic music exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East.
A winner of numerous awards for his compositions, including the Freeman Award for the work Hop Ken, Carl Stone is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Performance Arts. Recordings of Carl Stone’s music can be found on New Albion, CBS Sony, Toshiba-EMI, EAM Discs, Wizard Records, Trigram, t:me recordings, and New Tone labels.
A former Music Director of KPFK-fm in Los Angeles, he currently hosts a weekly program on KPFA. Other activities have included serving as a regular columnist for Sound & Recording Magazine in Japan, serving as web editor for Other Minds, a world wide web site devoted to New Music., and for the official web site of the John Cage Trust. . In 2001 he served as Artist-in-Residence at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in Japan, and in that same year he joined the faculty of Chukyo University’s School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences. His own web site can be found at http://www.sukothai.com.