Michael Northam

His first demonstration, the monumental 40-minute piece of the cassette Many Rivers Move Along The Surface Of The Magnet (Isomorphic, 1995), recorded in Seattle on "homemade instruments created from piano wires and motors", is a dynamic if amateurish concerto of droning electronic music. Meanwhile, he delved into Rene Daumal, physicist David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, physicist Ilya Prigogine, filmmaker Stan Brakhage and other free thinkers.

Also influential were his two collaborations with John Grzinich: The Stomach Of The Sky (Staalplaat, 1997) and The Absurd Evidence (1998), containing the 31-minute Incubation and the 20-minute Permeate. They also released the double cassette The Heuristic Dialogues (1997), credited to ERG. He also recorded with Ora (i.e. Darren Tate and Colin Potter), releasing the double-LP Amalgam (Editions, 1999).

He relocated to Oregon in 1999, but continued to travel and perform internationally.

Mnortham's sonic essays on how to acoustically reconfigure the environment picked up speed with the 21-minute droning piece of Breathing Towers (2000), recorded "inside two hollow steel towers with wind blowing across the open bases", his first major composition based on field recordings, and the three extended compositions of Coyot (2001), all constructed from wind sources in Finland, such as the 22-minute rumbling and menacing Observation Of Wind At Molecular States Of Evolution and the 22-minute cosmic The Copulation And Subsequent Conception Of Vacuums Between Wires And Winds.

The three extended compositions of From Within The Solar Cave (Absurd, 2001) employ air, metal, wire, horsehair, plants, larynx, harmonica, timpani, and so on: Antikatoptrismos/ Mirage (17:25), with some of his most tense drones (a bee-like buzz that turns into a muffled crackling which rises and falls), Rotunda (26:24), one of his most cosmic and spiritual vortices, and the lugubrious Helix/ Elte (21:23) which slowly turns into an horror-industrial nightmare.

The 54-minute droning piece of A Great And Riverless Ocean (Mystery Sea, 2002) concocts a metallic industrial ghostly atmosphere that after 25 minutes suddenly mutates into a sidereal void populated by gong-like echoes of distant worlds.

That period also yielded: the three extended compositions of Molt And Anecdote (S'Agita, 2003), back on the West Coast, notably the unusually chaotic and dissonant And and the dramatic droning 20-minute Anecdote; the four-movement Memoires Of Four Discarded Objects (2004), recorded in France and premiered in June 2002, notably the pulsating 12-minute Carrillon; the one-hour Porous (september 2001 - Sound Mirror, 2004), which documents 8-channel installations in Austria; the 20-minute Molecular Knot Phase One off the compilation 9 To 5 (Base, 2000 - 2006); the 63-minute piece of Brilliant Tedium (2005); the three extended compositions of Automnal 2003 (2006), notably the massive 33-minute Weave recorded in Switzerland, virtually the soundtrack of a glacier.

Northam was a virtuoso of the technique of digitally manipulating field recordings, producing dense aggregates of sound from the tiniest and slightest of sources.

Ground ( Sounds For Consciousness Rape, 1992) collects lo-fi recordings made on the road.

Notable collaborations included: Belle Confusion 0247 (1998) with Francisco Lopez, Andapa Garden (may 2003) with Judith Egger, Underleaf (2003) with Yannick Dauby (credited to Entrelacs), Live Sound Action In Bains - Connectives (april 2006) with Martin Janicek, The Otolith (recorded between 2003 and 2006) with Loren Chasse, Golden Shadow (2009) with Indian electronic musician Jatin Vidyarthi, Moriendo Renascor (2009) with� Japanese free improviser Seijiro Murayam, Les Arrels de la Mare Serp (2011) with French electroacoustic composer Emmanuel Holterbac, Cyclogenesis (2011) with Melanie Velarde, and Korglikon (2012) with Japanese ambient musician Hitoshi Kojo and French noisemaker Yannick Dauby.

He also formed Kodama with Hitoshi Kojo, documened on Les Chambres Nuageuses (Octpia, 2005), Turning Leaf Migrations (2009) and Phxa (2014), as well as Hokuro with Sachiyo Honda and Sabri Meddeb, documented on the EP Roh Men Rir Nehaayah (2012).

The EP Suhira (Substantia Innominata, 2009) is devoted to the sound of wind.

In 2004-2010 Northam performed in India, Scandinavia, Spain, Switzerland, France, Italy, Finland, Sweden and Germany.

More compositions appeared in the 2010s and 2020s: the 40-minute glitchy and dissonant piece of Frozen Illuminations (Nothing Out There, 2010), "a collection of sketches from a particularly cold winter in Berlin"; Hiding in a Church (Nothing Out There, 2010); the four pieces of Solar Night (Mirror Tapes, 2010), notably the noisy Bathing in the Golden Wrapper, the droning Zen-like meditation of The Mask of the Sun, and the mini-concerto for birds and metallic noise of Tunnel (best of the era); the four Aeostre Cycles (Orogenetics, 2011), namely the funereal droning of Ovulation, the multi-layered chaos of Fecundation, the fragmented, disjointed chamber music of Mitosis, and Oranur, a glitchy radio transmission from the otherworld; Le Septieme Deguise' En Neuf (Observatoire, 2014); Cloud Messages (2018); The Sublimating Mirror (2020), recorded in India and Nepal over three years, containing the subliminal Unencoded, the ear-splitting Temple Dust and the ethno-psychedelic fantasia of The First Month of the Shortest Interval of Time; Nine Mornings (2020); the three pieces of Stochastic Embroidery (Taalem, 2025), including the 17-minute Almost Nothing at the Mossy Stump (a delicate concerto of acoustic, natural and electronic sounds) and the dense grating 20-minute droning of Stochastic Embroidery.

His side-project The Jewel Ship released Embers (2020) and Ornaments of Emptiness (2021).