Part of the "Post Civilization" suite for film trailers.

© 2013 Diego Stocco - All Rights Reserved. 
Composed and produced by Diego Stocco (BMI). 
Published by Sonic Artifact Music Publishing (BMI)
For licensing information diegostocco.myportfolio.com/contact

Prelude

Submit booking, licensing, and label correspondence to keston@audiocookbook.org

John C.S. Keston is an award winning composer of electronic, experimental, and instrumental music. His work embraces the chaotic ambiguities of environmental and sensorial influences providing context within unpredictable or everyday events. His unconventional compositions convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. His compositions parallel indeterminate improvisation activating what remains immutable within traditional forms of notation driven music. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, to contribute to the work.

His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015) presented at the MNKINO Film Score Fest. He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on Unearthed Music. His latest release, Isosceles (2016) has drawn comparisons to the Stranger Things soundtrack. In 2011 he won the Minnesota Emerging Composers Award for electronic musicians. In 2013 he won the Jerome Fund for New Music for his project documenting binaural duets with the Singing Ringing Tree in the UK. 

John has performed and exhibited original work at Northern Spark, an all night arts festival with over 200,000 attendees (MN); the Weisman Art Museum (MN); the Montreal Jazz Festival; the Walker Art Center; the Burnet Gallery (MN); the In/Out Festival of Digital Performance (NYC); the Eyeo Festival (MN); INST-INT (MN); Echofluxx (Prague); WMC (Miami); and Moogfest (NC). In addition, Keston has worked with Atmosphere, Jon Davis, Martin Dosh, Peter Hennig, Joshua Herbst, Cody McKinney, Graham O'Brien, Adam Svec, and Nils Westdal to name a few. John resides in Minneapolis where he is a professor of creative multimedia at the University of St. Thomas and founded the widely read sound design resource  <a href="http://audiocookbook.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">AudioCoobook.org</a> where he shares sounds and writes about his unique approach to composition, production, and performance.

Diego Stocco is an inventor of unusual musical instruments, music sound designer and composer.
One of his most recognizable instruments is the Experibass, a mutated double bass for which he invented a playing technique called “Sticcato”, creating an intense combination of tonal and percussive timbres. With this instrument, he was invited to be a featured soloist on the soundtrack of "Sherlock Holmes" scored by Oscar®-winning composer Hans Zimmer, the video games "Assassin's Creed" and "Darktide" with BAFTA-winning composer Jesper Kyd and as a composer and performer of his piece “Thunderous” for the film "Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire”. As a composer, he produced the music for the video game "The Conduit” and the film "Chernobyl Diaries”, where he experimented with more strange instruments and sonic approaches. 
The music and sound design elements from his Sonic Artifact label, specialized in horror, thriller, western and sci-fi genres, is distributed worldwide by BMG Production Music and have been placed on dozens of film trailers, films and TV shows.

As one of the Principal Sound Designers, Diego created numerous iconic sounds for the core libraries of Spectrasonics Stylus RMX, Trilian, Bob Moog Tribute Library and the flagship synth Omnisphere. His approach to listening and psychoacoustic microphone techniques allowed him to discover musically playable sounds in a variety of common objects, such as light bulbs, a clothes drying rack, a leather hat, and a number of odd instruments created by combining pieces of furniture and parts of appliances with traditional instruments. One of his most extreme sampling session was the Burning Piano, a piano sampled while it was on fire. He later created his own Sonic Extension for Omnisphere called Twisted Trees, where he built original sculptural instruments inspired by forest trees and the random motion of elements of nature.

Diego explored the sound of nature and trees with a series of musical videos, starting from Music from Sand, Music from a Tree, and Music from Nature. In these works, a lighter, playful and more abstract approach to sound appears, where he let the unconventional sounds inspire the composition. He also built instruments that can be seen as imaginative little places, like the Magical Butterfly Valley and the Miniature Forest Piano, where the listener is invited to listen to the instruments as if they were played by butterflies and birds.

Diego also created a unique approach to Convolution processing with his “Rhythmic Convolutions” sets, where he takes sounds produced by a variety of objects, materials and interactions to create original Impulse Responses that transfer both their rhythmic and spectral profile to drums, synths and any instrument with fast attacks. Occasionally Diego teaches workshops and masterclass where he shares his imaginative approach with other musicians and sound designers.