Home » Events » Stratos Ensemble – Accident at Clear Lake

Stratos Ensemble – Accident at Clear Lake

Loading Map....

Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/21/2017
7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Location
E SPOT Lounge

Category(ies)

Add This Event to Your Calendar


Buy Tickets | $10 at the Door

The Stratos Ensemble, an experimental, improvisational, rock/jazz fusion group, is excited to present a full-media event including video art, cinematography, and animations, as well as noted poet B1, and interpretive dancers from the Venice DC. It will be a set of moody spacerock/jazz/ambient fusion, accompanied by cinema, dancing, poetry, and the usual ethereal cover ballad or two. The event begins at 7pm on Tuesday, February 21st, at the E Spot Lounge in Vitello’s, 4349 Tujunga Ave, Studio City, CA 91604 with DJ Roarkyd spinning an hour long set of downtempo before The Stratos ensemble comes on at 8pm. Admission is $10 at the door or $5 online in advance at goo.gl/gNqLiR.

The Stratos Ensemble is led by Dean De Benedictis – a recording artist also known as electronic musician Surface 10. His ensemble has been expanding the margins between electronic soundscapes and jazz sensibilities officially since 2004. Comprised of only experienced and knowledgeable players, the Stratos Ensemble’s format is almost completely improvisational, yet utilizes musicianship and a variety of methods to yield the effect of being pre-arranged music. This material fits in well when considered progressive jazz-fusion, but the band’s overall sound comes across far more cinematic and ambient than other ensembles decorating the fusion and jazz scene. Aside from founding member Dean De Benedictis, The Stratos Ensemble is essentially a band of circulating members, evolving over time. It veers towards a concrete list of personnel, but simply rides the tide according to whatever obstacles come up for its members.

The personnel on Accident at Clearlake are: Doug Lunn on bass, Brock Avery on drums, Daniel Coffeng on guitar and guitar synth, and Dean De Benedictis on piano and synth and electronics. This event will be dedicated to Doug Lunn who passed on last week after a long bout with cancer. Players joining De Benedictis on this gig will be Coco Roussel on drums, David Bosniak on guitar and guitar synth, and Jim Goetsch on sax and texture synths.

Holding the release event in Studio City is very appropriate, as nearby Clearlake Studios in North Hollywood is where Accident At Clear Lake was performed and recorded, in early 2016. This recording session was intended to provide more material for a Stratos album that would compile their best moments over the previous four years. After hearing the session back, the band decided that all of the material recorded that day at Clear Lake Studios should be an album of it’s own, hence it was an accident. This, coupled with the fact that portions of the music sound like they could easily pass for soundtracks to countless varieties of plausible catastrophic accidents, led to the title. The album is released on Dean De Benedictis’ personal record label, Fateless Flows.

Dean De Benedictis is an American composer, musician, performer, and producer of experimental and alternative music. He is a trained musician and has released albums as a solo artist as well as worked with various groups and artists such as Brand X and Nels Cline.

De Benedictis has recorded under his own name and under the alias Surface 10, a project in which he gained attention in ambient and experimental electronic music circles. His discography crosses over several genres, but he is primarily known for merging these genres into techno ambient music. De Benedictis is the founder of both Fateless Records, and the Fateless Flows Collective, which was a Los Angeles group of electronic composers. He released three albums with the Fateless Flows Collective.

De Benedictis is also the co-founder and producer of Cyberstock, which was an outdoor music concert and visual arts display held in the Santa Monica Mountains for 15 years. During its history, the event showcased such artists as Nels Cline, Thomas Ronkin, Laura “Elluxe” Escude, Tom Burbank, Henry Strange and George Sarah.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.