carl stone: himalaya

Carl Stone's follow-up to Baroo is a double album of recent works, including the final section of “Fujiken”, his epic journey through southeast Asian field recordings and street cassette culture. On all six tracks, composed between 2013 and 2019, Stone’s pan-global playground of looping synths and Asian pop culture remains as fertile as ever, digitally shattered into unimagined patterns and gestures, either through the MAX programming language or (in the case of “Kikanbou”) by generating live loops within an Elektron Octatrack sampler. The influences on Himalaya come from rock (the slow drum break of “Bia Bia”), disco (the Nile Rodgers-esque guitar riff “Kikanbou”) and hip hop (the frenetic percussion loop of “Han Yan”). Their diversity only adds to Stone’s borderless musical vision, a world where rhythm becomes atmosphere, song becomes beat, and pop becomes art.