Los Angeles – March 26, 2024 – Dean De Benedictis’ The Stratos Ensemble, the improvisational/jazz outfit he’s led that has been officially expanding the margin between electronic soundscapes and full-band sensibilities since 2004, released the single “Dunn” on all digital platforms today. The single will be available on The Stratos Ensemble’s Spotify here. The song is the first single from their upcoming album, Freeing Form, which will be released on all digital platforms on April 12.
“Dunn” was a group interpretation of a rough vamp sketch with no entirely premeditated parts (in Stratos’ tradition). The band also played along with a pre-programmed sequencer during the intro. The piece was improvised and recorded live at Clear Lake Studios in 2019 by Brandon McGregor (guitar), Coco Roussel (drums), Robert Gross (bass), and Dean De Benedictis (piano/synth/sequencers/samples). The title is a hat-tip to the band’s fun-but-short-stint guitarist, Brandon.
The Stratos Ensemble approaches its music from an ambient, progressive, cinematic style base rather than the traditional, non-idiomatic, free-jazz school of thought. They focus on textured audio exploration as much as musicianship, and their performances often extend into epic, long-form sets of sonic and melodic exploration, moving through peaks and valleys of intensity, mood, and emotional dynamics.
This latest LP by the Stratos Ensemble, entitled Freeing Form, is more versatile than any of the band’s previous releases. It covers a selection of work from 2013-2023, focusing mainly on the last two years of material performed by the band’s most current lineup of players. Various vocal elements are also introduced, a development following the arrival of a lead singer, Nichole Michelle Jones, in 2022. The music of Freeing Form, much like the rest of the Stratos Ensemble’s work, began as complete improvisations tracked at various studios. Later, De Benedictis mixed and edited these recordings to make them sound more like a production, supplementing the esoteric abandon typically associated with improvised music recordings. In that sense, Freeing Form gives up some traditional musical freedoms in an attempt to achieve some non-traditional (or new) ones.
The title of Freeing Form is a play-on-words to the term free-form and is a comment on the world of free and improvised music. One of the ideas it intends to suggest is that true freedom comes in many forms, even binding ones, and can be thought of in that way rather than always being considered a product of uncompromising will or whim.
The current lineup of musicians in The Stratos Ensemble are:
TJ Sammut — guitar
Robert Gross — bass
Nichole Michelle Jones — vocals, improv lyrics
Coco Roussel — drums, drum pads, additional synth
Dean De Benedictis — piano, synths, samplers, melodica, secondary vocals
Shaunte Palmer — trombone