Barry Schrader (Music MFA 71), electronic music pioneer and professor emeritus of The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts, recently released his first new album in more than a decade, Ambient : Aether.
Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “a composer born to the electronic medium” and praised by Gramophone for creating “approachable electronic music with a distinctive individual voice to reward the adventurous,” Schrader has been recognized for more than five decades of innovation in the field. He taught composition at CalArts from 1971 until his retirement in 2016, when he was named professor emeritus.
Composed in 2024 and 2025, Ambient : Aether represents both continuity and exploration. While ambient elements have appeared in earlier works, this is Schrader’s first album built around the style, although always filtered through his signature techniques of timbral transformation and musical development. The album also experiments with controlled distortion, introducing timbres that resemble forceful string playing, overblown wind instruments, and dense sound masses with audible artifacts. All of the sound material in Ambient : Aether was created using a computer and a variety of software; no acoustic sounds were used.
The album unfolds in four movements: Cloudrise, Atmospheric Rivers, Supernal Ascent, and Aether, which Schrader describes as “an imaginary journey through the aerosphere, traveling from the rising clouds we can see to the atmospheric edge and the invisible mythic aether beyond.”
Schrader’s body of work includes pieces such as Lost Atlantis, Monkey King, The Barnum Museum, and his futuristic score for Roger Corman’s cult classic Galaxy of Terror. Beyond his compositions, he is the founder and first president of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), author of Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music, and recipient of the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ambient : Aether, released on the Ex Machina label, is available as a limited-edition CD and digital download on Bandcamp.
