A combination of Dean De Benedictis's most tranquil tracks on this Soundcloud page, to help keep feelings at peace during this strange time. Listen or leave on in the background. It has a calming effect either way. Look Dean's music up online.

Main photo image by artist Ellen Jantzen.
Ellen's website:
https://www.ellenjantzen.com/

Fateless Flows Playlist - Music to Calm All Stress And Crisis

Tracks from the new Stratos Ensemble in 2013, soon to be released on CD and/or download in 2014.

The Stratos Ensemble - Yet To Be Released And Free Downloads

2nd Fateless Flows Favorites

The first track we recorded with our current bass player in the new line up, and unreleased. All improvised.  Presently unreleased music but building towards a second album. The organ solo on this track was not played by Dean, but rather the sax player Jim Goetsch.

First album here:
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/stratoensemble

Buy Our Last CD

Royce - The Stratos Ensemble (organ and sax solo by Jim Goetsch)

This is a long, experimental, deep-space track that Dean De Benedictis created in 2009.  It's a tranquil, drifty, and consoling piece.  It features a cycling drone Dean crafted from scratch, as well as a clip from the YouTube whisperer who goes under the name WhisperingLife.  Originally he created this track as a dedication to a friend's newborn; Dean wanted to create something to help the child sleep well.  The child's name was Stella.

How he made the drone:
"The cycling drone was produced by running a deep space sound generator from Reactor (called Space Drone) into the Resonator plugin that Ableton Live provides.  The resonators are basically a row of four vocoders. I tuned the pitch of each one until they made a minor 6th chord that was spread apart.  I then programmed Ableton's reverb for it's deepest size/decay and added that.  Finally, I programmed another sound generator (called Skerwell) to play random notes in the background and ran them through Ableton's ping-pong delay."

Dean De Benedictis - Drone for Stella 2009 (Whisperinglife Mix)

From the founder of Surface 10:
The Stratos Ensemble reformation is starting to come together.  Won't be long before material for a new CD is formed.  This track won't make it to the CD because of technical difficulties, but it's a perfectly good track, given away for free.  The fender rhodes solo on this song was not played by Dean but rather the sax player Jim Goetsch. Totally improvised; two keyboardists and an ensemble.  High quality mp3.

Personal:
Brock Bowers - drums
Kent Baxter - bass
Jim Goetch - sax & fender rhodes
Dean De Benedictis - keyboards and production
Anjelo Alonte - Violin

Fruits Of Friction - The Stratos Ensemble (rhodes and sax solo by Jim Goetsch)

This is a track I made in an empty room of a house that my family had already moved out of; on South Rim Ave., Thousand Oaks, CA, 2012. I consider it a part of my project Travels Rendered.

Last South-Rim-House Track - Dean De Benedictis

Dean and Jim from The Stratos Ensemble.

Website: http://thestratosensemble.com

(Photo by Dean in Patagonia, 2008.)

The Stratos Ensemble - A Tale Before Dreamt (Dean & Jim Duo Piece)

From the new album "A Fender Rhodes Solo" by Jozef Dumoulin, to be released on BEE JAZZ, February 27th, 2014.

Jozef Dumoulin: Fender Rhodes

More info: www.beejazz.com/blog/artiste/jozef-dumoulin/

Jozef Dumoulin is on Facebook: on.fb.me/1eSmFrN

Label Contact : BEEJAZZ
contact@beejazz.com

Jozef Dumoulin - "A Fender Rhodes Solo" - The Entry Point

where do i begin?

https://www.facebook.com/morningsmusic
https://www.facebook.com/morningsmusic
https://www.facebook.com/morningsmusic

http://mornings.bandcamp.com/
http://mornings.bandcamp.com/
http://mornings.bandcamp.com/

Bandcamp

Unkind

The first ever compilation track by The Stratos Ensemble, featured on the comp album Touched Two.

Whole album:
http://touched.bandcamp.com/album/touched-two

Stratos Ensemble track:
http://touched.bandcamp.com/track/my-broken-key-part-2

For A Good Cause

My Broken Key (Part 2) - The Stratos Ensemble (compilation track)

Download

Prenatal Hunters (Floex Revision)

You noticed that void inside everything, didn´t you?

Void Notice EP : http://vonwegen.bandcamp.com/album/void-notice-ep

buy on bandcamp

Void Notice

from 'Nomad Frequencies' [CD|2xLP|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den237
available in September on all formats at [http://denovali.com/johnlemke]

An ardent moulder of sound, John Lemke began carving out a very unique music blend on his debut album 'People Do' (2013) and its follow up EP 'Walizka' (2014). Informed by his work as a sound designer & composer for documentary films and his natural inclination towards fusing rhythm with rich textures and emotive melodies, he set out on a musical path that had been long in the making and is ever evolving.

The quest for unusual, inspiring sound sources has always been at the heart of John's process, however the genesis of his second album 'Nomad Frequencies' was rooted in much more inadvertent circumstances. In the summer of 2014, forced to indefinitely evacuate his Glasgow flat and studio due to structural damage from one hour to the next, with nothing more than a laptop and a bag of clothes, John embarked on a six month odyssey of soul searching, couch surfing and spending an extended period of time in his old hometown of Berlin for the first time in years - it was to be an odyssey that would help ferment and distill the ideas of his second album on which work had just begun. 

A year of particular global turmoil and upheaval, combined with John's personal, albeit very minor, 'displacement', caused a lot of questioning, frustration and anger, which somehow found its way onto the new material: a more confrontational, at times aggressive sound, paired on the other hand with a yearning for harmony, balance and space. Other influences came less from the world of music, but rather in visual form, through the densely textural art of Anselm Kiefer and the political, yet poetic musings of film maker Adam Curtis.

Intent on refining his sound toward a more minimal, bolder style, John set out to limit his sonic palate to a handful of carefully chosen elements. At the centre of this new direction remains the muted piano already introduced on his debut, but in a much more purified and raw form. This organic base is adorned by the warm fuzzing and wavering of analogue synthesisers, tape echoes, meditative tuning forks, field recordings from John's 'exile' period and percussion based on his rigid approach to sampling, which started developing on 'Walizka'. The guiding principle of his orthodox style of recording and sampling is to only use home-made sounds by utilising his own field recordings, applying contact microphones or hydrophones to objects and instruments, running them through different kinds of speakers and re-recording the sounds to arrive at a 'lived in' quality, often misunderstood as plainly 'lo-fi'. Touches of viola and woodwinds parts (Kim Moore of WOLF and Andrew Baker respectively) provide melody fragments and subtle details throughout the journey.

With John's healthy disregard for genre boundaries, the array of influences on 'Nomad Frequencies' is vast, but never over-powering. From the meditative tuning fork that starts proceedings on 'Of Elsewhere', the dub echoes to the hints of minimalism, free jazz explosions to the Lynchian atmospherics, all elements serve nothing more than the album's narrative journey between friction and harmony, best appreciated in its entirety. A rhythmic backbone collides with rich ambience and melody, often infectious and jarring at the same time, forging a soulful whole which most likely only reveals its true self after multiple spins.

Nomad Frequencies

John Lemke - The Unwinding

A remix of the voice-sample based ambient track by Surface 10.

Visit the Surface 10 soundcloud page: https://soundcloud.com/dean-de-benedictis

Art by Ellen Jantzen.

Surface 10 - ASMR Tragedy Lines - (Darren McLure Remix)

Temporary post and free download. Grab it while it's there.

Tangerine Dean - Plane Ride Back To LA From NYC - 2015

This is an unreleased track by the Stratos Ensemble, available here for free download. It is considered a part of their scrap material of 2013, but they were still moved enough by this particular track that sharing it seemed fitting to them. This track was improvised; it will not be released on any album, mainly due to minor audio blemishes in the recording that cannot be removed, which you may or may not notice.

Personnel on this track:
Jim Goetsch - sax
Brock Bowers - drums
Dean De Benedictis - synths and production
Kent Baxter - bass
Anjelo Elonte - violin

Image by our friend Ellen Jantzen, in 2013:
http://www.ellenjantzen.com/

Alt Solace - The Stratos Ensemble (extras of 2013)

(This piece is no longer available here for free download until a random and indefinite future time.) This is the very first piece of ambient music that Dean De Benedictis created on the shores of Mono Lake in winter of 2009. To create the music, Dean created loops of his piano and cedar flute, and then he used those loops in Ableton Live in a variety of ways. There is a possibility that this track will be released on an album, but if so it may not be in it's full form.

FirstAmbienceAtMonoLake - Dean De Benedictis (free dwnld)

The Stratos Ensemble is a progressive jazz band, the brainchild of producer Dean De Benedictis. The Fateless Flows Collective was an organization that Dean once ran, but now is simply the brand canopy that represents many of his extended projects, such as collaborations with original FF members and related material. Dean has decided to merge both his Stratos Ensemble content and his general Fateless Flows content on this particular SC page. 

The company name was originally the name of an electronic music collective Dean ran from 2003-05. From 2007-11 there was a plan to relaunch Fateless Flows as a record label, but it fell through. What remains are video channels on Youtube and Vimeo, and this Soundcloud page. Dean keeps his art and content coming, so he still uses the FF brand to release anything he works on that he also maintains rights control of, be it solo efforts or collaborative. Dean also has a separate SC page for his solo material.

Fateless Flows main image by Michael Jantzen and Dean De Benedictis. 

Dean De Benedictis' website can be found here:
http://deandebenedictis.com/

(Michael Jantzen's website:
http://www.michaeljantzen.com/Welcome.html)

The Stratos Ensemble - A Tale Before Dreamt (Dean & Jim Duo Piece)

The Stratos Ensemble & Fateless Flows Music