Michael Earls

Based in Montgomery, Alabama, Michael Earls began making music when he was a preteen using his Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard. He explored the sounds of his environment and learned how to push the limits of the device to accomplish sounds using undocumented features of the instrument. He collaborated with his best friend and they recorded music on a micro cassette recorder.

In his youth, he began making music after he was inspired by the public radio program Hearts of Space. His parents made sure that he had new cassette tapes on which to record the show each week so that he could listen to it many times in the following week.

His first release was 2000’s Southwest Feelings, an album inspired by his move to Arizona from his home territory in the Southeast United States. He was overwhelmed by the alien beauty that the desert presented him as he took long hikes in the desert, surrounded by new sounds and smells.

While much of his earlier work was rhythmic electronic that didn’t really fit into any specific genre, his current work tends toward experimental ambient soundscapes.

His music carries the essence of slow ethereal textures with obvious forward motion. Usually beginning with a lower drone note to set the stage, the music introduces a supporting mid-tone of a heavily processed synthesizer sound. Most all of the tracks in a piece of music are set to heavy delay, and ambience is provided by applying generous amounts of reverb. The underlying sounds are taken from various ambient sources, including heavily processed field recordings and time-stretched audio files of musical compositions.

Michael’s primary influences are Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Jean Michele Jarre, and Rafael Anton Irisarri.

He has five releases on Bandcamp representing over two decades of personal growth and experimentation. From his all improvisational Southwest Feelings to his latest experiment in “Intentional Music Programming”, where he defines the intent of his tracks using the Swift programming language. The entirety of Intentional Ambience was developed using computer code and an advanced algorithm to process the intents to generate the songs on the album.

Michael is currently working on his next release in his home studio, vigorously typing away at his computer keyboard to develop the next Intentional Music algorithm with the hopes that it will present him with a much more rewarding set of tracks than the first iteration. You can reach him at me at cerkit dot com.