Trans-Millenia Consort

The title track from her 1982 debut album, this piece establishes in its opening minutes the aesthetic that would define Strom's work: sustained synthesizer tones organized not into melody or rhythm in any conventional sense but into a progression of atmospheres, each one distinct and fully inhabited before yielding to the next. The word "consort" suggests ensemble and also suggests a particular quality of relationship — close, productive, the parties to the relationship shaped by each other's presence. The music works this way too, individual tones affecting and being affected by the others surrounding them, harmonic relationships that shift as sustained pitches interact in ways that simple notation cannot capture. There is no percussion, no discernible beat, no structural marker of time other than the pace of harmonic change, which is geological. Strom brings to this a quality of attention that the best meditative music shares across otherwise very different traditions: the sense that the composer was genuinely listening while composing, responding to what the sound was doing rather than imposing a predetermined structure on it. This responsiveness is audible — the music breathes, adjusts, settles.