Heavenly Music Corporation

by Sean Cooper
American composer and sound designer Kim Cascone may be more recognizable in his former role as head of Silent Records, the label he founded in the mid-80s, but his recordings as Spice Barons, Thessalonians, PGR, and, most often, Heavenly Music Corporation or his own name, have been equally as visible. A soundtrack composer through the early 80s before striking out on his own, Cascone studied electronic music arrangement and composition formally at the Berklee College of Music in the early 70s before studying in with Dana McCurdy at Manhattans New School in 1976. Subsequently working as assistant musical supervisor under director David Lynch on both Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart, Cascone left Hollywood for San Francisco in the mid-80s to pursue solo composition, forming Silent Records in 1986 after self-releasing his first PGR album, Silence. Though far more abrasive and conflicted than much of his later work, PGRs use of texture and compositional chance is a constant through the whole of Cascones oevre. A number of PGR titles followed — both on Silent and the RRRecords, Noctovision, and Permis de Construire labels — and Cascone has since gone on to record primarily as Heavenly Music Corporation, releasing the bulk of his work through Silent. Deriving the name from the seminal recording by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp on their 1973 collaboration No Pussyfooting, HMCs focus, with some exception, has been on beatless ambient, beginning in 1993 with In a Garden of Eden (composed just prior to the birth of Cascones son, Cage), and working through a series of releases in the mid-90s. Working toward increasingly abstract aural sculptures, HMCs dabbling with the club culture most new ambient composers look to for inspiration has stretched no further than the spares rhythms that pervade Consciousness III and some of Lunar Phase, with the lions share of his material drawing from early electronic and musique concrete composers such as Morton Subotnick, John Cage, and Luciano Berio. Cascone left Silent in 1996 to pursue design and composition at Headspace, a multimedia company started by Thomas Dolby. [See Also: Kim Cascone, PGR]