Paul Ellis - Rainforest and Pavement

Artist: Stefan Erbe
P: 2025
Erbe's third multimedia story about his android protagonist GENE strives for perfection on three different levels. Whether it's the music, the visual images or the story itself, all elements share a common intuition and ask the same question: when is something really perfect?
As in the previous story from 2023, Erbe blends the music with self-designed visuals and once again presents a complex and AI-generated universe of future thoughts and emotional developments of synthetic characters facing their own contradictions and moral choices. Of course, this theme is not entirely new, but Erbe presents it in a very special way. Music, images and story form a unity that has never been seen before. On the one hand, you get the feeling that Erbe's musical ideas are clear to decipher and that you can completely immerse yourself in the presentation of the story.
Nevertheless, he remains vague in his descriptions and leaves visitors plenty of scope for their own interpretations. No detail reveals the final meaning, but offers a variable motivation for the personal point of view.
Of course, the music on the current album also works excellently without the concert images. This time, the 12 tracks manage without additional vocals and atmospheric narrative elements and once again convey a narrative style that comes to a close in a spectacular finale.
The music therefore does not follow on from the concept of the previous album, but once again opens up a completely new chapter of unheard musical elements, embedded in Erbe's unmistakable sound of sequenced melodic structures, the deeply interwoven drum textures and his always very changeable sound aesthetics. However, Stefan Erbe remains true to himself in one thing. His great art of creating a 65-minute arc of suspense that fits almost every BPM category is a key element of his success over the last three decades.
While Stefan Erbe categorized the previous GENESYS23 album as “Eletronical”, his current concept should perhaps be described as “Imagical”.
Whatever a fitting description might be, Stefan Erbe is inexorably following the path of change and pursuing his own kind of hoped-for musical perfection with the album Metamorphosys. Perhaps even that of producing a final album at some point and being able to say that it simply can't get any better. But this misconception is probably the perfect reason to just keep going and never end with the pursuit of musical perfection.

Artist: Paul Ellis
P: 2011
From Out Of The Vast Comes Nearness, Paul Ellis’ latest album of new music, is a purely electronic expression of five long-form pieces that blend ambient sound design with rhythmic electronics, recalling the classic works of genre masters like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze or Vangelis; but with a restrained modern air.
With a mixture of synthesized sonics, both melodic and cerebral, the music brings to mind the unfolding expanse of the cosmos, stated with a graceful patience that propels the steadily evolving, constantly moving synthscapes to a highly personal level.
Fans of Paul’s style will recognize his signature immediately, and while this new work retains familiar elements from his earlier releases, it is perhaps his most reflective album to date.
Paul’s usual high production standard is maintained here, and his talent for sound design and the careful orchestration of each piece makes every element of the mix sit perfectly in place with an attention to detail that draws us closer with each listen.
From Out Of The Vast Comes Nearness is packaged in a dual gatefold presentation, in the tradition of the vinyl record jacket, with beautiful photography from master artist Pablo Magne, whose visual style will be familiar to fans of Paul’s other works such as Silent Conversations or Echo System.

Artist: Paul Ellis
P: 2021
LTD 200
The first of 3 releases by Paul Ellis. These stunning pieces of music willflow into your life and enhance it with it's subtle atmosphere. 
When I was young and in very quiet, natural settings, I could hear a kind of music in everything. This was an experience that was so common to me that I assumed everyone also heard this sustained, evolving sound, but I was quickly disabused of this notion that it was common when I tried to explain it to anyone. Later in my teenage years I bumped into a few early electronic music albums that seemed to reflect and generate that feeling I had and the inner music I used to hear. This led to my fascination with synthesizers and how, with them, I could create an environment and explore a kind of music that was inherently free on all levels: the form of the music, the timbre and tone. It was the freedom that really got me hooked, with the ability to paint my own sound worlds.

With Panoramas I am injecting a certain amount of chaos into the compositional process to emulate the randomness in what you hear when you're in the middle of a forest. I would deeply listen and realize that every bird, insect, wind, or water sound would happen with their own independent rhythms and melodies yet somehow this chaos did not really produce any discord. So for Panoramas, I took random musical expressions a step further than I had before, I laid down several initial tracks and as each one was added I muted all the other tracks so I could only hear what I was recording at that moment. So, it forced me to pay attention to each individual sound during its creation which made each sound arise in its own unique way. Next, I would layer another set of music and textures over the top while listening to the earlier tracks, which made part of the music conscious and reacting to the other sounds. I spent a long time working on these environments to get the balance between chaos and order right.

This is my transmission of the inner sound of the Pacific Northwest.