Living Labyrinths is the product of a series of unplanned conditions all lining up synchronously on the evening of the Summer Solstice, 2005 in Oakland, California’s Chapel of the Chimes - a mausoleum, designed by a series of luminary architects including Julia Morgan, that houses the remains of over 300,000 people.

A couple of days before that, I received an invitation from Gregory T. Kuhn (sound designer, friend and sometime collaborator/sound engineer with early versions of Trance Mission in the 1990’s) to present ‘his’ slot at the annual Garden of Memory event at the Chapel of the Chimes. This is a Solstice evening of simultaneous New Music performances all over the labyrinthian corridors, chapels and cloisters of the COTC presented by New Music Bay Area, an organization chaired by Sarah Cahill.

Eda Maxym – “Imagination Club” [Family Tree 2007]

This is Eda Maxym’s first solo release and though I tried at first to maintain a healthy distance as an outsider, as it was all happening in The Weaving Room, our garage studio in the Oakland Hills, it didn’t take long before my involvement in the project became fairly central. This turned out to be a real Home Team effort, with Simon Tassano coming in for the mixing sessions as the grand finale, although Eda’s choices of musicians do introduce a number of new faces to the Family Tree.

Ambient sound is, by its own terms, resistant to description, let alone evaluation. Its intent is to employ musical and other aural textures to set a mood, to facilitate a state of mind, perhaps even dreaming or meditation, it is most successful precisely when least explicitly noticeable.

Universally regarded as perhaps THE quintessential Trance Mission project, we teamed up in the studio with Simon Tassano on Meanwhile after a week or so of compositional planning sessions together as a quartet at John Loose’s home studio in the Sunset area of SF.

The first City of Tribes Label Compilation features 5 tracks which I am involved with. For a little while there CoT was like the Stephen-Kent-All-The-Time label J. This features a couple of tracks which are unavailable anywhere else – LIAFC “Back in the Mind”, which we spent almost as much time on in the studio as the whole of the “Somewhere” sessions, struggling to get it right.

Beasts of Paradise “Nobody Knew The Time” EP [City of Tribes 1994]

I tried not to be a member of Beasts of Paradise, which began with a series of minor collaborations in performance, first with myself and Barbara Imhoff, harp, and Diana Trimble, vocals [who were a well established duo on the Bay Area scene].