“… for me sound is a vehicle for interdimensional dreaming - a portal beyond the limits of the singular self and a potent force for vibrational healing. My music is a weave drawn from distinctive threads, spanning early years as a sound poet, art-rock song writer and theatrical composer, to my recent immersion in noise, ethereal ambience and numinous soundscapes.”
“At times I am an improvisor at play with an array of electronic instruments, or the studio craftsman burnishing bristling signals with a fine sense of detail … expanding possibilities in collaboration with singers and virtuosic instrumentalists, or finding myself centered deep in listening to the endless sound-worlds unfolding around us.”
David Stout - 2020
RECENT WORKS
Biofilia
time dilation for a waking dream - 2020
Invocar Jaguar
walking with fear as a companion - 2020
Particle Chamber Variation
This work utilizes the sonic output of a virtual simulation environment that combines a variety of audio-visual particle behaviors into a single composition. The software instrument used for this project is based on a granular synthesis engine designed with programmer-theorist-musician, Reiner Kramer. 2013
MADULA HARA
MaDula Hara is dedicated to the creation and performance of long form musical journeys for ceremonial practitioners exploring lucid dreaming and energy medicine techniques.
Invocation of Nisaba
Summoning the Sumerian Goddess, Nisaba, this sonic meditation coalesces in an interplay between vocal improvisation, slide guitar, layered percussion and electro-ambient orchestration.
AMY KNOLES & DAVID STOUT
The Hydra Sessions
Amy’s rhythmic virtuosity finds a fitting match in David's dramatic audio-visual settings that utilize digital sonification techniques to fluidly translate image into sound and sound into image. The result is a hypnotic musical experience that draws from diverse stylistic idioms, melding contemporary art music with elements of minimalism, jazz, noise, trip hop and ambient soundscapes. Performed on a networked instrumental system, Hydra integrates custom audio-visual software, modular-synthesizers, rhythm machines, acoustic drum sensors and gestural controllers allowing the musicians to drum the image and sculpt sound in mid-air. Hydra is both music for the eye and ear.
MUSIC FOR THEATER, DANCE AND FILM
Between 1978–2000 David completed a large body of work commissioned for dance, film, animation, theatre and gallery exhibition. Here are a few diverse examples:
Siege of Heaven
Written for a production of Jose Rivera's Marisol, directed by Wendy Chapin. Vocal (vocoder) performers: David Stout and Julie West.
The Operation
Trio with Blade
… from Tracy Rhoades’ dance drama, The Seventh Veil
Air
… from Tracy Rhoades’ dance drama, The Seventh Veil with singer, Julie West
INDEPENDENT RELEASES
re:touch – 1995
During the cassette era David produced a dozen independent albums that were shared via the fans and musicians involved in the indie recording scene of the time. His final compilation in this vein, re:touch was completed in the early 90’s. re:touch is a collection of tracks created over the slow fade between the 80’s & 90’s, combining commissioned works for theatre and dance with rhythmic atmospheric instrumentals. Here are a few cuts:
01. The Somnambulist
02. Celeste
03. Slip in, Dismantle
04. Undercurrent
05. GreenLine
06. Tracks to the Lair
07. Hosting Wolves
08. Red Sea Mix
09. Hive
10. Trio with Blade
11. Air
Slip in, Dismantle
GreenLine
Composed 1985
Undercurrent
Slow Plane Circles – 1988
Passion Bound – 1987
The Gathering Cloud – 1986
In the Heart of the Silent Wood – 1985
I See Angels – 1982
Dance Disarray – 1981
All Known Rivers – 1981
Quartz Hills – 1989
Gentle, peaceful soundscapes for synthesizer and tape, perhaps best likened to Music for Films Eno or Kitaro's Ten Kai. Most of it is exceedingly subtle and accomplished.
—Robert Carlberg, Polyphony, 1983
Read more...
The cassette surges to life with a bloom of percolating arpeggios that amount to a kind of ad hoc drone, the layers roiling over one another for brief moments to shine in the foreground. And just as quickly, we are left floating above an austere landscape; the dense, nebulous drone having given way to glittering points of sonic light, beamed from fathomless pockets of the void. Stout's improvised playing takes on a lilting, balletic quality that seems to imply that we have arrived somewhere as yet uncharted.
Our Echoplex-shaped craft slows to surveil this new place; hovering over the topography in search of something on which to affix our attention. And then we find it: an aural cavern of sparkling synth trills. This is not a dead mineral space. Rather, there is life here—both in the painterly expressiveness of the piece, but also in the tiny artifacts of unintended electrical crackle that drop into the soundstream from time to time (no doubt a point of frustration for the artist, but nonetheless a charming reminder of the organic nature of composing improvised music in an era where the option to edit was a luxury).
Side B is a far more minimal affair. Low-frequency swells are offset by a glassy vibrato, each woven around a meandering, semipatterned melody played on the middle keys, which eventually reduces to a slumbering, bitonal drone. From here we are swept into a plume of burbling and aquatic tape-echo—a vibrant and richly textured garden of cascading tonal clusters that subsequently give way to the sparse, slow-motion conclusion of the piece. The listener is alien in this place to which Stout has delivered us, but one feels no particular impulse to return home.
—Jesse Woodcock, 2018
COMPILATIONS
Switched-On Eugene – 2018
Moods For Misty Evenings – 1989
