Carl Stone is a musical treasure - an emblem of experimental and electronic practice - a visionary whose multifaceted contributions to the landscape of music have carved a deep, and all too rarely celebrated path. Over the last decade, the New York based imprint, Unseen Worlds, has taken great strides toward placing Stone in the center of our thoughts - first with the reissue of his crucial debut, Woo Lae Oak, and then with their two critically heralded surveys, Electronic Music From the Seventies and Eighties and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties. Now, remarkably, they’re gracing the world with two new albums of recent works by this astounding composer - his first releases of solo music since 2007's Al-Noor - Baroo and the 2LP collection, Himalaya. Proof that Stone’s efforts remain as vibrant, forward thinking, and challenging as ever, both are absolutely essential and groundbreaking bodies of electronic sound.

Beginning his studies in composition with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney at CalArts during the 1970s, quickly shifting toward electroacoustic research, Carl Stone, even while still a student, proved to be a radical and ground breaking mind. His earliest efforts were largely dedicated to pure electronic sound, generated by modular synthesizers, but before long he found himself organically shifting toward an unprecedented rethinking of the practice of sound collage - using prerecorded music as source material, which not only has been widely credited as laying the groundwork for the practice of sampling, but has also defined his singular practice and body of work, emerging and refining at a rapid pace over the decades since.

Baroo, distilling decades of work within Stone’s entirely singular compositional approach, is comprised of five previously unreleased works. With the exception of Xé May, created in 2011 and performed on Elektron Octatrack, all were composed in 2018 for live computer performance, running programs that Stone built himself, deploying a technique of time slicing which he began developing during the 1990's, metaphorically shattered sound files and then reorganized into mosaic patterns.

Across the breadth of Baroo a wild, fractured whirlwind of sound in collision emerges - musical fragments and reference points flitting in and out of view, colliding and transmogrifying into something unlike anything else - an entirely singular form of sonic psychedelia born of Stone's relentless drive to harness technological evolution as a force toward new forms of expression. Experimental music at its logical culmination, yet as it’s rarely been heard, Baroo is an absolutely stunning and essential piece of work.

Following hot on the heels of Baroo, comes Carl Stone’s Himalaya, a stunning double LP collection, comprised of six works composed between 2013 and 2019.

Constructed with Stone’s own Max programming language or by generating live loops within an Elektron Octatrack sampler, each of Himalaya’s distinct works takes us deep into Stone’s long standing practice of building new worlds out of a pan-global palette of sound. Fractured and polyrhythmic, unimagined, tripping patterns and gestures stitch a mind-bending, entirely experimental dance of tones, touchstones, and staggering beats - a machine music, shimmering with possible futures, which takes the ear back to the great optimism of the avant-garde, imagining the possibility of a better world found through uninhibited creativity and sound.

An endlessly challenging listen. Profound and laden with surprises, across the breadth of Himalaya’s four sides emerges an image of the pure joy of organized sound. Proving himself to be far more radical and forward thinking than many who have followed in his wake, Himalaya proves that it’s going to take us a long time to catch up with Carl Stone. Brilliant, essential, and not for the faint of heart.