Trance Mission, Kenneth Newby, Beth Custer, etc

Trance Mission was a masterful project of ambient trance and Fourth World music. And the group was only the tip of a much larger collective, led by Canadian Kenneth Newby and Briton Stephen Kent (the latter long settled in San Francisco), which also included Lights In A Fat City and Beasts Of Paradise.

Stephen Kent, originally from England, had already released the EP Furious Pig (Rough Trade, 1980) with a vocal-only ensemble, and learned to play the didjeridoo during a stay in Australia. Returning home, he began performing it in public squares alongside percussionist Eddy Sayer. In 1991, he settled in San Francisco and became involved with the avant-garde movement called "modern primitivism." Kent developed a didjeridoo technique that was deeply Western (essentially, he used it like an organ) and soon began performing it with other musicians in an avant-garde ensemble: Lights In A Fat City.

Composer and electronic keyboardist Kenneth Newby, also part of the ensemble, grew up in Vancouver, trained in classical music, and studied philosophy. He had already composed music for a dance company. His musical mission arose from his wide-ranging cultural interests: passionate about free jazz and psychedelic rock, a journalist for a cyberpunk magazine, and a scholar of Indonesian music. Like others in electronic music before him, Newby sought to fuse Western composition with Eastern improvisation.

Lights In A Fat City centered on Kent, Newby, and Sayer. The ensemble�s experimental work aimed to find a meeting point among three independently developed styles. Somewhere (These Records, 1988) was perhaps the first Western album built around the sound of the didjeridoo. Most tracks are long sessions of hypnotic tribalism (Thunder and Valley Of The Winds), but When I Go Up experiments with a unique gospel for didjeridoo, rattles, and African percussion, while Guboo is essentially a didjeridoo solo immersed in a riot of metallic percussion.

Sound Column (Extreme, 1993) was recorded in the summer of 1991 inside the pillar of a San Francisco monument and consists of four improvisations for didjeridoo, sampling, and acoustic instruments. The work ranges from the austere stasis of Taksu to the lively dynamics of Aluna, from the metaphysical depth of the didjeridoo-harp duet in Memory Ground to the vast kaleidoscope of sounds and noises in Surya.

Upon returning from a stay in Java, Newby recorded the solo album Ecology Of Souls (Songlines, 1993 � Hearts Of Space, 1994), originally conceived as a multimedia work.
Consciously or not, Newby was reconnecting with Jon Hassell�s electronic world music (interpreting Third World music through First World technology), but Newby relies solely on exotic instruments. The most ethereal effects are achieved through sampling and the exaggeration of timbres.
Four long suites divide the work. Equinox begins softly, with distant light tribalism and a lament reminiscent of Hassell�s clay trumpet, gradually building into an intricate polyphony. Percussive cycles give the piece a hypnotic quality, while the dissonances of some instruments lend it a dreamlike aura. This is minimalism that evokes more intoxication than ecstasy. In Newby�s hands, it becomes a surgical instrument for probing the abyssal depths of Aboriginal cultures, the roots of humanity, seeking traces of our lost instincts.
The monumental Persephone uses a bed of static sounds stretching into nothingness to create a suspenseful atmosphere, over which the solemn flute soars, imbued with Greek-like tragedy. Newby�s improvisation on the instrument is among the most intense and dramatic in the history of music, fading into intergalactic drones, oceanic waves, extraterrestrial solfeggio, and wind vortices, as if a camera were pulling away from the planet, capturing the scene from ever-increasing distances.
Ephemera is the ideal soundtrack for an immersion in an astronomical atlas: a nebula of hisses and muffled clangs, stripped of identity, blended with esoteric whispers. The piece has few rivals in the realm of subliminal music. Odalan demonstrates how chance can be the raw material for a composer: precisely from the absence of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic patterns, from the mere existence of fragmented sounds, can the most intense music emerge.
From start to finish, the album is a triumph of the sense of mystery.
Newby�s music is measured, calibrated, meticulously crafted, where nothing is wasted and nothing is accidental. At the same time, it is slowed to the point of evanescence, as if to stop time and allow emotion to crystallize, leaving open a hundred interpretations of its sonic allegory.

The Trance Mission project originated from the spontaneous sessions that Lights In A Fat City held with local musicians. One of these was clarinetist Beth Custer, already active in the Clubfoot Orchestra since its founding. Another was percussionist John Loose.
The debut album, Trance Mission (City Of Tribes, 1993), is a forward-looking work that fuses jazz improvisation, atmospheric electronics, and tribal rhythms. Clarinet, didjeridoo, sampling, and ethnic percussion dominate. While Bo Didgeley adopts the tempo and structure of boogie, its orchestration recalls Zappa, and references to ethnic music proliferate from Rig, with its Eastern-style hypnotic chant, to Kif, with a driving jaw harp rhythm and a carefree accordion motif. The creativity is lively enough to feature the jazz theme of Folk Song for solo clarinet with a Hare Krishna-style ending. Ensembles like One and Third Ear Band, which sought to capture the essence of Eastern transcendentalism through exotic instrumentation, come to mind. The Trance Mission, however, do not imitate anyone. They are effectively a chamber quartet performing experimental music with conservatory-level discipline.
The eleven-minute Tunnels is pure trance teeming with collateral sonic events, halfway between new age and cosmic music, while the nine-minute Icaro mimics a Tibetan "om." It feels like a revival of the hippie-circle vibes of the 1960s, but with hindsight, greater awareness, and technical mastery.
Elsewhere (Vee Dee Vu) one hears a livelier version of Jon Hassell�s electronic world music.
Newby uses this as an opportunity to refine his skill in electronically manipulating sound sources, a field in which he effectively invents his own language and sets a standard for future generations. He also demonstrates a keen sensitivity to the suggestive power of sounds, reflected in his choice to operate within a broadly "ambient" style.

The sound is even denser on the second album, Meanwhile (City Of Tribes, 1995). A more "commercial" production shifts the focus toward disco-friendly world music, giving the work an even more "Indian" feeling. The unstoppable orgy of Go Play Outside is built on a raga rhythm, the clarinet�s enchanting melodies, the Arabic wails of singer Eda Maxym, and the obsessive resonance of the didjeridoo. Clarinet improvisations lead Bindi into jazzier territory, but also maintain a heightened exotic suggestiveness, as the usual electronic blanket no longer envelops the pandemonium of ethnic instruments. In these tracks, music is primarily a feverish rhythm, culminating in the percussion and didjeridoo charge of Chasing The Moon Rabbit.
At the other stylistic extreme, Every Stone's Dream focuses entirely on visionary and ancestral atmosphere while delivering the same medicine as the first track. Zozobra revisits Hassell�s psycho-ambient shadows in a sophisticated weave of wind-instrument melodies. Sunrise evokes the inner ghosts of primitive populations, carried by electronic echoes and hypnotic repetition.
Even deeper into the sonic horizon is No They There, perhaps the most conceptual track, infused with jazz and dissonances as well as psychedelic fades, performed in the austere chamber-music format. The album ends (or perhaps begins) with the long collective trance of Surrender and Maxym�s transcendent vocalizations in the foreground. At times, it sounds like a fusion of Third Ear Band, bebop, and techno.

Newby, perhaps distracted by his solo projects, remains somewhat in the background, sometimes relegated to a second �set� of percussion. Beth Custer now dominates the project.

Beasts Of Paradise is the project initiated by Stephen Kent, accompanied by Barbara Imhoff on harp, Geoffrey Gordon on percussion, and Eda Maxym on vocals. After the EP Nobody Knew The Time (City Of Tribes, 1994), featuring harp, didgeridoo, toy piano, and exotic percussion (especially on Nobody Knew The Time), Gathered On The Edge (City Of Tribes, 1995) presents an improbable fusion of chamber music, ambient music, and street folk (notably Flickering Blue).

Stephen Kent released Landing (City Of Tribes, 1995) on his own, destined to remain a milestone for the didgeridoo (and itself the logical continuation of a path begun in 1988 with the track Veedeevu on Somewhere by Lights In A Fat City). The percussion (played by a host of guest artists) plays a fundamental role this time. Almost always, the didgeridoo�s vibration is driven by a dense, frantic beat behind it, and it is this combination of static frequencies and dynamic pulses that creates the hypnotic effect.
The ritual begins, following Aboriginal tradition, with a fast-paced Energizer. Yekke picks up momentum from that surge. But Kent�s true calling is solitary meditation in the desert. Hale (eighteen minutes) and even more so Bopp (thirteen minutes), with drones allowed to oscillate solemnly over staggering frequencies, constitute his testament both spiritual and artistic.
This refined exercise in post-ambient trance moves from Jon Hassell�s world music to Mickey Hart�s tribalism.

Trance Mission are heirs to the most atmospheric, most new-age avant-garde, and on that foundation they built the code of a new genre, the �techno-tribe.�

Finally, Beth Custer privately released The Shirt I Slept In (Custer, 1995), an album recorded with a swarm of friends, including members of the Club Foot Orchestra.
Beth Custer is the exceptional clarinetist who, together with Stephen Kent and Kenneth Newby, founded Trance Mission, and has been a member of the Club Foot Orchestra from the very beginning. For the recording of her first single, as well as the members of the Club Foot Orchestra, Custer also enlisted the help of numerous Bay Area celebrities. The album is jazzy and dissonant, which may disappoint those expecting a continuation of Trance Mission�s drone-oriented project. By avant-garde jazz standards, Custer�s music is quite pleasant and linear, often developing around a readily identifiable leitmotiv and occasionally drawing from traditional music. A weakness can be found in the incidental nature of the compilation; the album lacks a unifying theme, a cohesive approach, no focus, and no ultimate meaning. Yet, after all, the preferred expressive medium of the Club Foot Orchestra has always been the �fragment� rather than the opus magna, and in this, Custer decidedly follows in the group�s footsteps. In terms of imagination and harmonic daring, this work surpasses any other piece by the Orchestra I have ever heard.
The album suffers from the �occasional� character of the compositions, but Custer succeeds in creating a brilliant, jazzy, dissonant sound, structured around engaging leitmotivs.

Trance Mission returned with Head Light (City Of Tribes, 1997), a work that feels like a neurotic and impulsive creation. The trance emerges from convulsion, but a convulsion that retains classical elegance.
The rhythm of Monkfish is almost neurotic, propelled by a syncopated, driving dialogue between percussion and didgeridoo, repeated more obsessively than stubbornly, almost minimalist. Animating this dark landscape are the distracted flutters of flutes and ocarinas. Adding a touch of humanity is the romantic clarinet solo, layered over other clarinets in the background. More than an impressionist painting or a cinematic insert, the piece is an allegory. The pattern repeats relentlessly. The tribalism and noises of Head Light create an atmosphere of suspense, simultaneously cosmic and hallucinatory, once again serving as the stage for the enchanting clarinet (this time counterpointed by monstrous didgeridoo tones in an almost Persian crescendo).
The limits of this approach to counterpoint between rhythm and improvisation are, on one hand, the romantic ode Worksong, sung by Eda Maxym in a style halfway between Dead Can Dance and Enya, set atop a clockwork mesh of Middle Eastern cadences, and, on the other hand, the ethnic metamorphoses of In Frog Pyjamas, an almost Dadaist sketch in which African tribalism fades into dub steps, tip-tap, Charleston, and swing orchestras. The album nonetheless also allows for moments of reflection, such as Alpha Swim, a sleepwalking jazz from a galactic cocktail lounge, and The Sun Cries (in two parts), a refined play of light and shadow, timbres and pauses, especially in the second movement, modeled on classical adagio.
The atmospheric climax is indeed the anguished poem of prehistoric swamps, Their Hands Are Blue, the track most faithful to Jon Hassell�s ritualistic/narrative/pictorial approach. The sound is increasingly less electronic (perhaps due to Kenneth Newby�s growing disinterest) and increasingly anchored in three complementary dimensions: Loose�s tribalism, which forms the harmonic framework; Kent�s didgeridoo drones, which color that framework with human and metaphysical shades; and Custer�s lyrical improvisations, ever more the protagonist voice of this complex tragedy.
Much of the album is in fact an homage to various noble ways of appropriating the heritage of Third World music, from Enya�s approach (Worksong) to Jon Hassell�s (Their Hands Are Blue).
Rather than merging the four personalities into a unique and innovative style, the album becomes a collection of different personalities and styles, each prevailing over the others. From the point of view of harmonic construction, it is probably the quartet�s most accomplished work, but this is also its limitation: an excessive focus on making music rather than conceiving it.

Meanwhile, Kenneth Newby released Sirens (City Of Tribes, 1997), a work that presents him in a more humble role. Newby has always been influenced by Indonesian music, and this album is a sort of personal tribute to gamelan orchestras. It is therefore a work more rhythmic than melodic. The electronics serve mostly as filler, a frame, a stage design. The true protagonists are the flutes, subtly manipulated in a Jon Hassell-like fashion to achieve maximum techno-primitivist seduction.
Saraswati emerges at the intersection of mystical inspiration and a slightly jazzed tempo. The percussive framework lends itself to learned explorations like Sirens I, halfway between Terry Riley�s minimalism in In C and a new-age imitation of Middle Eastern melodies and timbres; and it sounds even more Middle Eastern on Eileithya, with its hypnotic flow of long drones oscillating frenetically. Yet Newby�s vocation is not a scientific treatise�it is art that touches the heart. In Fathom, the sound gradually takes shape, like dawn and mirage, until the percussion begins to intone its ceremonial roll over the fleeting enchanted landscapes of the flutes.
Newby nonetheless remains firmly in the current of �cosmic couriers� in his way of drifting through his dream world. The exquisite psycho-impressionist canvases of Ecology Of Souls resurface in the dark meanders of Howe Sound, within a chasm of slowly moving electronic sounds.
In the search for transcultural music of the new millennium, Newby is one of the surest guides, and his vision is among the clearest and most powerful.

Stephen Kent too released a solo album. Family Tree (City Of Tribes, 1997) is a (double) didgeridoo album that serves somewhat as a compendium of Kent�s career, featuring tracks from Trance Mission (Head Light from the album of the same name, Zozobra from Meanwhile), a track from Lights In A Fat City (Veedeevu from Somewhere), a track from Beasts Of Paradise (Red Rock from Gathered On The Edge), a track from Landing (Jungnawangra), and an unreleased 1989 piece (Toots).
This double CD represents the continuation of a previous didgeridoo album, Landing (City Of Tribes), widely regarded as a key work in this musical genre, and as the natural next step in the progression that began in 1988 with Veedeevu from Somewhere by Lights In A Fat City. Kent is a prolific artist, engaging in bold musical excursions across a wide front (Beasts Of Paradise, Trance Mission, Steve Roach). This time the percussion (courtesy of various friends) plays a crucial role, evoking Indian-style improvisation.
Listeners can choose between frenetic rituals like Energizer and Yekke, or solitary desert meditations (Kent�s most authentic vocation) such as Hale (lasting 18 minutes) and Bopp (13 minutes). This double album also serves as a compendium of Kent�s career, including tracks from Trance Mission albums, Veedeevu, a piece from Beasts Of Paradise, and one from Landing.

Barbara Imhoff kept herself busy with all sorts of projects and collaborations: Beasts Of Paradise with didjeridoo master Stepehn Kent et al., Ring with singer Patti Clemens and Aether with Diana Trimble.

Aether's debut was The Smoke Of Vanished Kisses (City Of Tribes, 1996). Imhoff and Trimble worked together in theatre and film scores: that experience comes handy to paint their little sketches with vivid, dynamic colors. No wonder, then, that compared with other Imhoff's ventures, this album sounds much more mundane, without a doubt the most song-oriented of her career.
The catchy Mr Magician could be Natalie Merchant's new hit. The loud and frantic techno/worldbeat polirhythms of Lipstick Traces and Give Away My Fear belong to a disco, not to a concert hall. Dissonant, oft-kilter and eerie, Be crowns the duo's search for existential atmospherics that can still be accessible to a broad audience. The harp is somewhat forgotten in the uproar. This is Trimble's personal show. As proven by the visceral agonizing of Half Light, she is some classy, aggressive singer in the tradition of the great blues/jazz tigers.

Ring, the duo of singer Patti Clemens (also in the worldbeat combo D'Cuckoo) and harpist Barbara Imhoff, is well represented on Soul To The Pleasure. Enya-like vocalizing and graceful strumming push songs like Into The Blue towards new age territory, while the jazzier scat and exotic steps of Closer attain a lighter, warmer sound. The fusion of mantra-like radiance and pop hooks culminates in the swinging minimalism of Soul To The Pleasure, a composition that is steeped as much in folk music as in the avantgarde. Rhythm appears in State Of Grace's stirring progression from religious chant to gospel shout. The martial hymn of The Storm is all the opposite: the harp barely tinkles as the crystalline lament reaches for the skies. The album is adorned with three (mostly) instrumental interludes composed by Kenneth Newby.

Trance Mission interrupted the numerous solo projects with a live album, A Day Out Of Time (City Of Tribes, 1999), which reunited Stephen Kent, Beth Custer (more and more seductive on trumpet and clarinet), vocalist Eda Maxym and percussionist Peter Valsamis, but left behind keyboard wizard Kenneth Newby.
The live setting brings to the foregroung the ludic element of dance that has always been. n general, the album is not so much an anthology of past work as a document of the state of the art of this commune of musicians. For example, it includes two versions of Head Light, which act like two different remixes of the same song: the first one is in the vein of Jon Hassell's mellow and cryptic fourth world music, the second one is all pounding tribal dance. Working Wheel continues along these lines of exorcizing orgiastic rhythms embellished with jazzy clarinet and african vocalizing. Coherent with this program, the band returns to Chasing The Moon Rabbit, a track originally featured on Meanwhile, and to Monkfish, from Head Light, two of their most savage tracks ever. Go Play Outside, from Meanwhile, almost mutates into a techno locomotive.
Three new tracks unveil a further evolution in the sound of the band, in particular Curious Wine is a song (truly a song), which leverages on the melodic theme in the clarinet and is propelled by the ever incessant rhythm of didjeridu and percussions; and Secret Void, a fairy tale told and sung by Maxym in a vocal style that is remiscent of Meredith Monk.

The next chapter of the saga was a new Lights In A Fat City album, Memory Ground (City of Tribes, 1999), titled after a track of Sound Column and containing an early 1990s live recording of the trio Sayer, Newby & Kent, Taksu, Aluna and Surya, besides the title-track, were the highlights of Sound Column.

The opera Seasonal Round (2005) was a collaboration between Ken Newby and poet Robert Anthony, combining spoken word, acoustic, and acousmatic sound.

In 1999 Beth Custer held in San Francisco the premiere of her Vinculum Symphony, a site-specific installation in collaboration with Trimpin. At the same time she released The Broken Fields Where I Lie (BC, 1999), another austere compendium of jazz improvisation and chamber music, that was re-released as Dona Luz 30 Besos (City Of Tribes, 2000). It collects music composed for the Club Foot Orchestra, the Clarinet Thing, the Joe Goode Performance Group and Esther Paik's film "Virtue", plus excerpts of her Vinculum Symphony. If there is a unifying theme, then the album is a tribute to the Afro-cuban tradition in the manner of a personal revisitation of Latin-jazz music. Fronting a rocking quartet, Custer impersonates more the electic singer than the avantgarde composer. Songs run the gamut from cerebral progressive-rock (In The Broken Fields Where I Lie, One Direction) to quasi-folk singalongs (the anthemic march of O Fredonia could have been a staple of Joan Baez's repertory forty years ago), from soul-jazz balladry (Long Time Now recalls Traffic's sophisticated jams) to sleepy blues/jazz (Rich Blanket Of Love, that features her masterly clarinet playing and Morricone-style vocalizing against romantic piano tinkling). The whole album is a delight, but Custer's finest moment comes when Brenda's Music Box borrows Robert Wyatt's techniques of abstract humming and metaphysical suspension.

Custer was also active in the jazz duo Will Bernard/Beth Custer and in the trip-hop combo Eighty Mile Beach.

Beth Custer's The Maverick Strain & Other Stories (Beth Custer, 2002) collects dance pieces. Respect As A Religion (Beth Custer, 2005) is one of her most eclectic collections, and features Ralph Carney, Ben Goldberg, Graham Connah on keyboards, Charming Hostess' Marika Hughes on cello and many other friends. She formed in 1989 the Clarinet Thing that recorded Agony Pipes And Misery Sticks (C+P BC, 2005), featuring Ralph Carney, Ben Goldberg and Peter Josheff, and Cry Want (2009), featuring featuring Sheldon Brown, Ben Goldberg and Harvey Wainapel. Custer's chamber composition Bernal Heights Suite (2006) for string quartet and voice was performed by members of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (cellist Leighton Fong, violist Kurt Rohde, violinists Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin) and herself on vocals. Beth Custer's soundtrack My Grandmother premiered in 2012.

The three volumes of Kenneth Newby's Emergence Trilogy (2018), namely Chambers, Elegeia, and Spectral (Golden) Lyric, a continuous loop in which the last piece of the third part, Toccata and Imbal, refers back to the first piece of the first part, Prelude - Invocation, were entirely composed and performed on a computer and, in part, by the computer. Chambers contains 23 pieces for string quartet or chamber ensemble. It begins with ten "microludes" for string quartet: Prelude - Invocation is a series of repetitive patterns that alternate between hysterical and sleepy; I. Overture is one minute of syncopated hiccups and stammers; IV. Window Advance I is even more discontinuous. No matter how "spastic", the movements have a lightweight quality, especially the two dances, VI. First Dance and X. Second Dance. After the slippery cacophony of Procession I, we enter the mysterious world of the three-movement For Kathryn, another discrete, "algorithmic" piece of music, but more linear and almost melodic. After another convulsed interlude, Procession II, we are faced with the agonizing neurosis of Stealth for String Quartet in four movements. These are all short movements. The ten-minute suite For Mingus is the exception, a sort of deconstructed, Cubistic version of a jazz jam. Procession III, another brief acrobatic dissonant piece, ends the program.

Elegeia opens with the dizzying, whirling Swarm, a looping technique later reprised in Swarm II. The five-movement Snark is "friendlier" chamber music than the one on Chambers. It includes two spiraling "burlesque" movements that sound like digital remixes of themes by Ravel or DeFalla, and the third movement, Reflection, mocks jazz again, with horns and contrabass. Khora in five movements, dedicated to Pauline Oliveros, is a lyrical and dramatic piece that employs droning sounds in rapid movement. The second movement, Elegeia, is particularly evocative. However the five movements don't seem to be part of a coherent strategy. For example, the fourth movement, Symmetries II for Semara Dana, is simply a gamelan study. Elegeia ends with the seven-minute Crepuscule for Barbara, an abstract noir piece for an anemic gamelan ensemble.

Spectral (Golden) Lyric contains the four-movement For Rosa, the 12-minute Strange Attraction, an abstract piano piece with disorienting percussive sounds, the eight-movement Wisps, which is similar to the fragmented studies of Chamber, and the six-minute Toccata and Imbal, that transitions from a jarring percussive section to an aggressive pulsing dance.

Stephen Kent released Oil & Water (2004) and Living Labyrinths (2007)

Barbara Imhoff died in 2016 of cancer.

Custer scored many dance productions (notably "The Maverick Strain" in 2002 and "Folk" in 2024 both for the Joe Goode Performance Group, and "What If Would You" in 2013 for the AXIS Dance Company, a revival of a 20-year old performance), composed the oratorio Water Worship (2017) for a 12-people ensemble (including Left Coast Chamber Ensemble string quartet), collaborated with writer Octavio Solis on four musicals (from "June in a Box" and "The Ballad of Pancho & Lucy" she derived in 2024 the material for Roam), and released Sky (2023), a collaboration with guitarist Will Bernard. Wee 3 Kings (2024) collects music from the soundtrack created for a play in 2020, while The Boys Who Said No (2020) and Crossing Columbus (2024) documented film soundtracks.

The trio of Beth Custer, Stephen Kent and Peter Valsamis resurrected Trance Mission and released Le Pendu (2020).

Newby released From Solitude (2025, subtitled "music for spectral orchestra".