The story

The studio was founded in 1996. It was an escape into sound and light. We located in a low rent office on the other side of the tracks on the industrial east bank of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. Dust from the grain barges unloading dockside filled the air. A monitor computer exploded once and I half suspected rogue grain dust accumulation or some form of infestation. We carpeted the place and installed a Mac based studio that ran on Cubase.

A reclusive artist friend was our immediate neighbor and in the lower half of the building were a metalworker and our friend Francienne Vaulk a sculptor. She cut marble with a circular saw that screeched in the afternoon and added stone to grain dust.

The studio was designed to explore the art of soundscapes. Inspired by John Cage, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Terry Riley, Lamont Young, Stockhausen and, in particular,my mentor Tim Souster. I had been Tim’s student in the late seventies at The University of Keele.

Later, the studio would absorb my communications planning business and become Studioriley V2.0 that ran from 2002 to 2006.

The early days were about solo sound installations, such as “Cathedral” in 1997 at Reed University and “Music for Donegal West” to celebrate a friend’s new home on the upper west coast of Washington State, on the shores of Willapa  Bay. The connection between place and sound had been established years earlier by John Cage and remains an interest of the studio. The idea is simple: that some music can be designed to be site specific and enjoyed in a particular context, or in reference to specific idea (such as “Versus”). When decontextualized the music changes but contains within it, the original muse. Collaborations with Fredrick Bouche and Roland Brenner were highlights from that era.

Today, the studio is reverting to its original brief: to explore sound and art, this time in the context of a bigger inquiry about the nature of our worlds. The insight of art is as powerful as the insight of science. So we will look to other people who are drawn to understand who we as multiple societies and as powerful individuals can relate to that blue globe called earth and that radiant being called human.