Consonants & Dissidents by Stockhausen Syndrome

Stockhausen Syndrome was formed in 2017 and played our first gig in 1999.

On the surface, we are a fairly straightforward jazz-rock trio, keyboards, bass & drums. But each of us has an electronic shadow, a ghost player that augments and extends our core instruments, JD triggering loops and samples from an Akai MPC, Page with live looping and delay effects, and I’m using modular synths with various step sequencing and generative techniques. Sometimes we are all playing in real time, sometimes we’re entirely electronic, usually, we’re somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. Everything we play starts out as improvisation, and the three pieces here are, at their core, improvised in real-time, with no edits, with the overall structure and compositional flow determined by what happened in the room. Other instruments and effects are applied in the mix process, but the idea is for these augmentations to enhance the original intent.

We like to play with the concept of human time (loose, grooving, flowing) versus machine time (tight, precise, rigid). It’s relatively easy for a reasonably talented human player to follow the machines, but relatively difficult for the machines to follow the humans. This recording has both approaches.

Drummer/composer/theorist Dave Storrs, with whom we have all played, has an improvising concept he calls “Executing a Stay,” the idea of remaining in a feel, a texture, a key, while improvising, to really explore the depths of that specific space. Too often, in the heat of live free playing, you will tend to throw out a lot of ideas, jumping quickly from one to the next, but real depth can be found by staying in place. We feel these three pieces are particularly well-executed stays.

The first and last pieces were recorded in one session, using the same samples and textures as a starting point, but ultimately following different maps through the same territory. Consonants is peaceful, calm, maybe even meditative, probably the best piece of pure ambient music we’ve played. Dissidents has more uneasy harmonies and unstable textures, leading to a free blowing section with fuzzed-out Rhodes and some killer drumming from JD.

There is No One is based on a set of analog step sequences with no obvious accents or downbeats, hence the title, where the “one” falls in each bar is up to interpretation. I programmed it to be in one spot, as we played it, I heard it in another, and JD felt it in a third. None of these are wrong. What you hear here are JD and Page’s first reactions to these sequences. Page takes lyrical fretless bass solo over most of the piece, floating above the web of synths and drums.

The title comes from the common misuse of the word “dissident” when “dissonance” is intended. “Cecil Taylor’s music is really dissident,” is a sentence I actually heard uttered by a customer at the record store I work at, a statement that is both hilariously wrong, and deeply true at the same time. I love the unintentionally creative misuse of language.

This album is dedicated to the memory of Paul Schreiber of Synthesis Technology, whose MOTM modular synthesizer is used liberally on these tracks, and has been a huge source of sounds and inspiration for decades. RIP.

Please enjoy the music!
-Dave Trenkel, May 2025

Stockhausen Syndrome is a guitar-less power trio based in Corvallis, OR, focussing on integrating live electronics, live looping, and modular synthesis into an improvising band context.

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