For 1983’s Plot Zero, Strom adopted a psychedelic approach and embarked on a “mind trip without chemicals,” as she described the album’s tense, low-frequency vibrations. Here, her music is imbued with a hypnotic warmth that teeters on the brink of darkness. Immersive opener “Mushroom Trip” dances around a tight, tripwire melody and chiming vibrations, lodging in the brain with near-psychotropic force. The tactile approach continues on “Organized Confusion,” whose burbling, droning melodies induce a trancelike sense of hypnosis, and especially “Plot Zero,” a striking composition that opens with cinematic, windswept tones before settling into a mesmerizing, cyclical synth pattern. Plot Zero prompted pushback from some New Age purists who took issue with its drug references, but Strom never swayed. “You look at Plot Zero and the new things that are in my head—that’s not what New Age would’ve wanted,” she said in 2017. Her willingness to break from genre convention allowed new forms to take shape in her music.
Echoes, Spaces, Lines’ reissues conclude with the frostbitten Spectre, released in 1984. Inspired in part by vampire stories, the album wields a pronounced, desolate sound palette. The low, murky tones of “Spatial Spectre” drift like fog over a graveyard in a horror film. Strom even incorporates organ melodies into “Blood Thirst” and “Blood Celebrants,” reshaping the liturgical sound alongside throbbing intonations and cosmic keyboard arpeggios. Even in its darker shades, her music contains an enchanting, roving curiosity, an extension of her seemingly endless imagination.
That mindset is best captured on Oceans of Tears, the previously unreleased record that caps the physical box set. Celestial and contemplative, it’s an astonishing addition to Strom’s catalog that expands on her fascination with the natural world. The languorous “Summer Rain” allows an entrancing theremin and ambient rumbles of thunder to commingle in meditative harmony, while “Ancient Sea Ritual” follows a winding chord along a bottomless underwater path. On the standout “Domestic Peace,” a synth flute trails over quotidian noises that Strom manipulates into a fascinating, shapeshifting piece, amplifying recordings of a cooing baby and plates and cutlery placed on a table—so it would “feel like you were setting that plate down in a vast canyon,” she said. It speaks to Strom’s extraordinary ethos, using everything within her grasp to create intangible beauty. With the lovingly crafted Echoes, Spaces, Lines, Strom’s individualistic art is proven as exquisite now as it was then, speaking a language entirely out of time.
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Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
