Angel Touch

Strom was a blind San Francisco composer who worked with synthesizers from the late 1970s through the 1990s, creating music of extraordinary sensitivity and formal originality outside of any major commercial or critical framework. This piece draws on synthesizer textures that combine the clinical precision of early electronic music with something genuinely spiritual in aspiration — Strom was interested in healing and consciousness, and the music reflects those interests without becoming didactic. Tones are rounded, warm, sustained at lengths that encourage a particular quality of attention. The composition moves through harmonic regions without arriving anywhere in a conventional sense, drifting between adjacent states like light changing on a surface. What's striking, historically, is how little this music resembles what was fashionable in new age circles of the same period — it lacks the easy consolations of that tradition, offering instead something more genuinely strange and original. The production is of its era in terms of technology but outside any period style in terms of sensibility. Rediscovered and reissued in recent years, it has influenced a generation of ambient composers who encounter in it a synthesis of emotional depth and formal rigor they find elsewhere mostly in isolation.