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Chris Schlarb

Chris Schlarb is a musician, composer and producer based in Long Beach, California. His newest album, Psychic Temple, is a four song mediation on beauty featuring a 29-musician ensemble. Time Out New York said the album “blurs the line between avant-garde jazz and chamber music,” while National Public Radio mused, “in its wordless pastoral journey, Psychic Temple is boundary-less.”

His debut solo album, Twilight & Ghost Stories, was critically hailed as both, “40 minutes of avant-garde bliss” by the New York Observer and as “a monumental achievement” by FFWD Weekly. His following release, Interoceans, with experimental jazz duo I Heart Lung, was chosen by NPR as one of the Top 5 Jazz albums of the year in 2008.

In 2011, the Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren video game NightSky was released over 45 minutes of original music composed by Chris Schlarb. The game was nominated for the Independent Game Festival‘s Seumas McNally Grand Prize and was an honorable mention for the Excellence in Music category. BoingBoing went on to describe the soundtrack to NightSky as “What Game Music Can Be” and IGN rated the music 9.0 out of 10, saying, “This is the sort of thing people mean when talking about ambient gaming.”

As a musician and producer Chris has collaborated with Mike Watt, Sufjan Stevens, Nels Cline (of Wilco), Mick Rossi (of The Philip Glass Ensemble), Dave Longstreth (of Dirty Projectors), Dave Easley (of The Brian Blade Fellowship), Chad VanGaalen, Ikey Owens (of The Mars Volta), electronic musician Daedelus, drummer Chad Taylor (of Chicago Underground Duo and Iron & Wine), Busdriver, Kris Tiner, singer/songwriter Diane Cluck, Castanets, bassist Steuart Liebig, The Weird Weeds, Rare Grooves, instrument maker Walter Kitundu, Soul-Junk, Roberto Carlos Lange (of Prefuse 73), Eric Hamelin, Shannon Fields (of Stars Like Fleas), and DM Stith.

The recipient of grants from the Canada Council For The Arts and Meet The Composer, Chris Schlarb is a member of both ASCAP and the American Composer’s Forum. He releases music on the Asthmatic Kitty record label and has appeared as a guest speaker and lecturer at California State University Long Beach, NX35 Festival in Denton, Texas, West L.A. College, and the NMASS Festival in Austin, Texas. In 2001 Chris started the Sounds Are Active label specializing in jazz, experimental, electronic and other progressive musics. In 2006 he produced and released the Sean Carnage film 40 BANDS/80 MINUTES!

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12
Album Review

Chris Schlarb: Making The Saint

Read "Making The Saint" reviewed by Ian Patterson


Having spent four years cutting and pasting fifty trusted musicians on his stunning debut solo recording, Twilight & Ghost Stories (Asthmatic Kitty Records, 2007) guitarist/composer Chris Schlarb may understandably have felt like scaling back. Instead, Schlarb invested similar time and resources to sculpt the beautifully meditative folk-jazz ambient suite Psychic Temple (Sounds Are Active/Asthmatic Kitty Records, 2011) and the outsized pool of backing musicians was on hand again for Psychic Temple II (Asthmatic Kitty Records, 2013) with its Frank Zappa ...

6
Interview

Chris Schlarb: Psychic Temples

Read "Chris Schlarb: Psychic Temples" reviewed by Ian Patterson


Truck driver, husband, father, and law-abiding citizen by day, Chris Schlarb presumably dons a cape at other moments that transforms him, if not quite into the savior of creative music, at the very least into the creator of other-worldly sounds of singular vision and exceptional beauty. Guitarist, composer, and founder of independent record label Sounds Are Active, Schlarb has been at the forefront of the underground/alternative music scene in Los Angeles for the last 15 years. Through his association with ...

6
Album Review

Chris Schlarb: Psychic Temple II

Read "Psychic Temple II" reviewed by Ian Patterson


Multi-instrumentalist/composer Chris Schlarb rarely does things by halves. Psychic Temple (Sounds Are Active/Asthmatic Kitty, 2011) was the exotic fruit of over a 1000 hours of studio time and an opus that involved twenty nine of California's most progressive musicians. Wordless choir, strings, horns, acoustic and electric instruments combined with drone and subtle electronics to create an utterly sublime sonic meditation--the final word in folk-jazz ambient music. However, with Schlarb, music is always in a state of transition. So it is ...

205
Album Review

Chris Schlarb: Psychic Temple

Read "Psychic Temple" reviewed by Ian Patterson


Chris Schlarb isn't your typical composer, working for a year on this music before writing any melodies. However, given that his previous recording, the beguiling Twilight and Ghost Stories (Asthmatic Kitty Records, 2007), took four years and long periods of soul-searching, little the guitarist and electronics musician of such adventurous outfits as Create (!) and I-Heart-Lung does is that surprising anymore. Except, that is, for the music itself. It would've been difficult to imagine a follow-up recording more beautiful or ...

774
Interview

Chris Schlarb: Are You Creative?

Read "Chris Schlarb: Are You Creative?" reviewed by Ian Patterson


Guitarist and producer Chris Schlarb has been at the heart of creative, underground music in Los Angeles for a number of years. His involvement in bands like I Heart Lung and the fifty-member collective Create(!) has resulted in improvisational music of great imagination, no little dissonance and undeniable beauty, as witnessed on the outstanding albums Between Them a Forest Grew, Trackless and Quiet (SAA, 2007) and A Prospect of Freedom (SAA, 2006)His first solo album, Twilight & Ghost ...

308
Album Review

Chris Schlarb: Twilight and Ghost Stories

Read "Twilight and Ghost Stories" reviewed by Ian Patterson


Inspiration comes in many guises. In the case of guitarist/producer Chris Schlarb, a rainstorm triggered a synapse in his brain, unlocking a creative process leading to Twilight and Ghost Stories. That is the simplified version of events. Schlarb's first solo album is, ironically, the fruit of contributions from fifty artists. Each forwarded segments of music or field recordings of varying lengths, which Schlarb shaped painstakingly over a period of four years. The result is a fascinating collage of sounds.

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57

Interview

Guitarist/Producer Chris Schlarb Interviewed at AAJ

Guitarist/Producer Chris Schlarb Interviewed at AAJ

Source: All About Jazz

Guitarist and producer Chris Schlarb has been at the heart of creative, underground music in Los Angeles for a number of years. His involvement in bands like I Heart Lung and the fifty-member collective Create(!) has resulted in improvisational music of great imagination, no little dissonance and undeniable beauty, as witnessed on the outstanding albums Between Them a Forest Grew, Trackless and Quiet (SAA, 2007) and A Prospect of Freedom (SAA, 2006)

His first solo album, Twilight & Ghost Stories ...

“Immersive… meticulous and controlled.”- New York Times

“Top 5 Jazz CD’s of 2008. Schlarb’s projects capture a form of emotional release that few avant-garde musicians can muster.”- National Public Radio

“sumptuous, richly textured… impressively coherent…”- Chicago Reader

“unorthodox, but it’s far from difficult: Much of it has a dreamy, pastoral mellifluousness.”- TimeOut New York

“an entirely original approach to What Game Music Can Be”- BoingBoing

“this is improvised music as art at its very best.”- All About Jazz

“The fantastic ambient/jazz/electronic soundtrack is good enough to enjoy outside the game. 9 out of 10.”- IGN

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Making The Saint

Asthmatic Kitty Records
2014

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Psychic Temple II

Asthmatic Kitty Records
2013

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Psychic Temple

Sounds Are Active/Asthmatic Kitty Records
2011

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NightSky Soundtrack

Unknown label
2011

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Twilight and Ghost...

Asthmatic Kitty Records
2007

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White Dove In The Psychic Temple

From: Psychic Temple
By Chris Schlarb

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