Bleep

The 21st century has proven to be a time of great reflection, which has led to a mass culture catching up with what was once criminally overlooked. Pauline Anna Strom was just such a formidable force, curiously excluded from the new age conversation, which tended to skew towards a given ‘canon’ of male composers. The planets began to realign with the release of 2017’s Trans-Millenia Music, an anthology LP that placed the deeply-felt inner visions of Strom’s synthesist innovations back through the public’s ears. Audiences were dazzled, while many of Strom’s followers since her prolific period between 1982 and 1988, were finally validated.

This is Strom's first LP in over three decades. Crafted in the long-lease San Francisco flat she occupied with her many machines and two pet iguanas, Little Soulstice and Ms Huff, Angel Tears in Sunlight is a remarkable album of searching intimacy, in tune with a wider cosmos of new age possibility. Shades of ambient, ‘fourth world’ hybridity burst with colour on the gently propulsive hand percussion and kalimba of ‘The Pulsation’ and ‘Equatorial Sunrise’. ‘Marking Time’, with its constant arpeggiated choral pad circularity, treads territories between the electronic and the organic in a quantum-leaping recollection of the atavistic as well as the avatar, sounding as urgent and modern as anything made by Holly Herndon, Jlin or Vessel. As is her pioneering style, Strom’s remembrance of our oldest instruments and customs is bestowed a forward-facing momentum once more.

A work of striking singularity and steadfast vision, Angel Tears in Sunlight is a reminder to the world that Pauline Anna Strom was a true original. A portion of the proceeds from the LP will benefit The International Iguana Foundation. Rest in peace Pauline Anna Strom.