Chris Strouth

As a performer, Strouth has played in a range of styles including techno, jazz, and punk.[15] He has also worked frequently as an organizer of entire scenes of bands, typified by the electronica collective Future Perfect Sound System, which he founded in 1995.

The collective was an important early exponent of electronic music and rave culture in the Midwest, receiving favorable comparisons to Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events.[16] Future Perfect performed frequently at First Avenue nightclub, the Walker Art Center, Weisman Art Museum,[17] and other galleries, with showcases that sometimes drew more than 30 performers,[18][19] and released two albums, 1997's Music For Listening[20] and 2001's The Nature of Time.[21][22][23]

In 2009, Strouth founded another musical collective, Paris 1919, named for the post-World War I artistic renaissance.[24] The project was founded shortly before his diagnosis with kidney disease, and Strouth's compositions for the band often deal with his illness and recovery. For instance, the short piece "Blood Mountain" is about Strouth's experience on dialysis, and bases its core rhythms on those of dialysis machines.[25] Paris 1919 began as a solo, studio-bound experiment in sonic collages; Strouth has described the music as sounding "weird and chaotic and structureless and purposely off-beat"[2] but notes that it is also created from a painstaking process which may involve more than 1,000 edits.[25] It grew into a semi-improvisational live band with a rotating membership, which has performed a series of multimedia shows combining music, theater and dance in immersive environments, often working with choreographer Deborah Jinza Thayer. 2014's "Antarctica" used the theme of an ice cave to explore Strouth's journey through his kidney ailment and recovery.[26] The same year's "Safe As Houses" placed both performers and audience in a giant dollhouse as a metaphor for the housing crisis and Strouth's own loss of his home the year before.[27][28]

Paris 1919 has also recorded four albums. Book Of Job was released in 2011 on Go Johnny Go Records.[29][30] Antarctica, a companion album to the stage performance, was released in 2017 by UltraModern Records.[31] In 2018, Strouth released Risking Light, a soundtrack album to director Dawn Mikkelson's documentary about forgiveness.[32][33][34] Although credited to Paris 1919, the album was written and performed by Strouth as a solo work.[35] The fourth album, Collected Short Fictions, is still unreleased.

Strouth has also frequently led Paris 1919 in creating live soundtracks to silent films, including Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog,[2] and the 1930 mystery The Bat Whispers at the 2014 Minneapolis Comic-Con.[36]

Strouth composed, produced and (with storyteller and comedian Matt Fugate) co-wrote the 2004 jazz and spoken-word holiday album Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail, which features a band including saxophonist George Cartwright of the jazz group Curlew.[37] Originally created in 1993 for a performance-art series at Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis, a revised version was recorded in 2003 and issued privately as a Christmas gift. The following year, the album was given a wider release by Innova Recordings. A remastered digital edition of Snaildartha was released by Stand Up! Records on November 13, 2020.[38] The album has developed a cult following thanks to its regular inclusion in DJ Jon Solomon's daylong marathon of Christmas music on Princeton, New Jersey radio station WPRB-FM,[39] as well as an annual Christmas broadcast on KFAI in Minneapolis.[38] The album's reputation has continued to grow with time; in 2022, Vulture writer Maura Johnston named Snaildartha one of the 50 best Christmas albums of the last 30 years, calling it "an ideal lazy Christmas Day soundtrack" that "gets even better with repeated listenings."[40]

In 2011, Strouth was a conductor for the four-act opera Czeslaw's Loop, performed live on a floating barge on the Mississippi River, which included performers as diverse as classical soprano Maria Jette, techno-pop group Information Society's Paul Robb, and Tom Hazelmyer of the punk band Halo of Flies.[41][42]

In 2018, Paris 1919 performed ...For Now, a project combining symphonic, Eastern European, minimalistic, and Renaissance folk music elements, at the Church of St. Boniface in Minneapolis. Strouth joked to an interviewer for Minnesota Public Radio that ...For Now was his "middle-aged symphony to God," referencing Brian Wilson's description of the Beach Boys album Smile as a "teenage symphony to God."[24]

Strouth's early band King Paisley and the Pscho-del-ics performed at Rifle Sport[10] and released a nine-song album in 1986, Death Rockin', which was re-released in 2011 on Go Johnny Go.[29]

Besides composing and performing music, Strouth founded his own label, UltraModern Records, in 1995,[43] and was the director of artists and product at two other influential Minneapolis labels, Twin/Tone Records (1995–2001)[15][44] and Innova Recordings (2001–2004).[45] At Innova, Strouth worked on albums by dozens of artists including Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, Beat Circus, Matthew Burtner, George Cartwright, Victoria Jordanova, Phillip Johnston, and Hyatt's Grammy-nominated album The Clouds.[3] Twin/Tone, already nationally prominent thanks to a roster including alternative-rock pioneers The Replacements, grew to develop an umbrella relationship with a dozen smaller indie labels, including UltraModern.[46]

UltraModern focused on neo-psychedelic, indie-pop,[12] and noise/electronic rock,[10] releasing albums by musicians including ex-Wall Of Voodoo leader Stan Ridgway, jazz guitarist Skip Heller, Future Perfect Sound System, Ousia, and Savage Aural Hotbed. UltraModern received wider distribution through partnerships with Twin/Tone, Atomic Theory Records, and New West Records.[12] The label's catalog includes: