Composer of ‘ transcendent’ electronic soundscapes dies
Composer Pauline Anna Strom, who earned a small but devoted following in the early 1980s with a series of probing electronic soundscapes released under the name TransMillennia Consort, was found dead in her San Francisco apartment on Sunday. She was 74.
Her death was confirmed by record producer Matt Werth, who reissued her music in a 2017 compilation on his label, RVNG Intl. No cause of death was given.
Working alone with lowtech equipment — a few elementary synthesizers, a fourtrack tape recorder — Strom created music infused with a keen spiritual edge and an appreciation of nature. Under titles such as “Mushroom Trip” and “Rain on Ancient Quays,” her compositions, which often grew out of marathon solo improvisation sessions, fused psychedelia with an expansive sense of time.
“I really think she was creating her own worlds and realities,” Werth told The Chronicle in a phone interview. “She was operating at a higher consciousness. This music is as transcendent as it comes.”
Werth played a central role in bringing Strom’s music to a
broader audience. Her early recordings were privately issued and rarely heard, except by the fans who swapped cassettes through the back pages of specialized music magazines.
Werth, whose Brooklyn label focuses on experimental dance and electronic music, was one of those devotees, and he set out to make contact with Strom. It wasn’t easy.
“It was a matter of six years’ correspondence, a long exercise in trust building,” he said.
At the end of that process, he got permission to release Strom’s early work as a compilation, “TransMillennia Music.”
Strom was born on Oct. 1, 1946, in Louisiana. Blind from birth, she grew up there and Kentucky, the oldest of four siblings in a Catholic family.
In 2017, she told Bay Area journalist Sam Lefebvre that she had grown up listening to an array of classical music including Bach and Chopin. But her decisive influence, she said, came after she had moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and discovered the German electronic tradition embodied by Klaus Schulze and the band Tangerine Dream.
“Their music was timeless, and it traveled,” she said. “The spaciousness of it, the timeless quality, where it can be in any universal realm — that’s what captivated me.”
After releasing seven albums in the ’ 80s, Strom sold her synthesizers and retired from music. She pursued a spiritual practice as a Reiki healer, living alone in her Tenderloin apartment with two large lizards named Little Soulstice and Ms. Huff.
Werth said the release of “TransMillennia Music” had introduced Strom’s music to a new generation of listeners and had inspired her to take up composition again. One new track, “Marking Time,” was released last month, and a full record of new work is due in February.
“Pauline was cantankerous, strongly opinionated and fiercely independent,” he said. “She had so many theories about everything. A conversation with her was like a running commentary on the everyday ins and outs of the world.”
Strom is survived by her three siblings. Plans for a memorial service are pending.