“A lovely tapestry of swirling synths, piano reflections, and discreet atmospherics that exemplifies the work of Stefan Christoff. A highly enjoyable listening experience, ideal listening for quiet evenings and careful meditations.” - Amir Abbey (Secret Pyramid)

On this solo album I share five sonic explorations occurring within different musical landscapes.

The tracks are windows into my creative process and are shaped by lo-fi experimentations as driven by diverse tonalities. I really thought a lot about sound texture when working on this project.

The album opens with a long synth work that is a collaboration with my brother Jordan Christoff who plays the synth layers. I worked in field recordings on this track, registered at a beautiful spot overlooking Sooke River in British Columbia. On an afternoon walk with my brother and partner, artist Tanha Gomes, I quickly noticed the beautiful sounds of the river rapids and pressed record. The end of this track is the sound of walking with my mother Merrie Houghton alongside a Pacific Ocean inlet.

The second track is based on online keyboard experiments. Late one night, while working on tracks for my duet project with Julia E. Dyck, called SILVER MOON X, I was experimenting with digital keyboard interfaces on random websites. I recorded various bits, some are included on my album with Julia, now out on Aural Canyon records in Texas. For this album, I share some solo silver sounding piano bits that hold nostalgic tones.

In Burgas is very different from any other track I have released. I am playing an old organ that my friend Bashar passed on in Montréal. I had worked with Bashar in the context of my involvement in the Coalition Against the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees, a grassroots campaign in Montreal in the years after 9/11 that came together to oppose and fight Palestinian deportations at the hands of the Canadian government. This campaign took time but largely worked and a network of many Palestinian refugees won their status in Canada after being undocumented.

In all the years after I kept in touch with Bashar who knows about my musical projects. One afternoon Bashar, who works as a mover now, got in touch because a family that was being moved was going to ditch an organ, so Bashar came to drop it off. In the year after that I explored and experimented with the organ. The name of the track references the city Burgas in Bulgaria, which I visited briefly on one of my trips to Bulgaria and the Balkans with my partner Tanha. The beat and the style of playing on this track speaks a bit to the tones and rhythms of the Balkans and West Asia. My father’s family is originally from Bulgaria and Macedonia, so I was experimenting with the sounds that you hear while reflecting also about my family roots.

Chalga Remixed, the fourth track, is a work that draws from short microsamples from Balkan popular music. After a conversation with my brother Jordan I started experimenting with creating a drone piece based on Chalga microsamples and made this work. First we talked about Vaporwave and sound stretching production tactics, then as we often do, we talked about Bulgaria, the Balkans and music, then Chalga music came up. I remembered some Yugoslavian pop tracks that were super beautiful and tragic and featured in the excellent film The Load, by Ognjen Glavonić. This film is a very important piece of Balkan cinema about the complexities around the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, a must watch for anyone living in a NATO member state, like Canada. I watched that film with my father also, that was a very moving experience. On this mix I reworked some tracks from the Balkans, I will list the names of the original songs in a moment, in no particular order, you won't be able to hear them directly in the mix, this is total drone reimagination. In this excerpt we hear samples from pieces featuring the voices of Виолета 'Вики' Миљковић and Камелия.

The last track, Haunted Land, is a very recent solo piano experiment that I recorded on Van Horne street at a collective musical rehearsal space that I participate in. I was thinking while playing about colonial ghosts in the present in the context of North America as clearly it is all the stolen Indigenous lands of Turtle Island.

Thank you for listening!

–– Stefan Christoff.