The music of Sound Strider is more than electronic dance music, it’s intelligent dance music. Just as ancient rituals connected mankind to its roots through drums and dance, Sound Strider’s Intrepid Travels EP is designed to bridge EDM’s past and present through eclectic sound and historical backbone. Intrepid Travels is an influential compilation of music inspired mainly by the counterculture of the 1960s, most notably Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters, who were pioneers of the free-spirited, psychedelic drug movement. Sound Strider combines bass-fused digital and analog production, along with historic voice samples and futuristic beats to create an intelligent, mind-expanding listening experience. Intrepid Travels dares to push electronic music furthur than ever before, through tribute to those that helped the EDM experience get to where it is now.
Five tracks make up the Intrepid Travels EP, and each tell its own story in the history and culture of the 60s era. The first track, The Stakes, features vocal samples of JFK campaign speeches and advertisements for “Futurama,” an exhibit at the 1939 New York world fair. Menlo Park is named after a research facility, in which Ken Kesey participated in a government-sponsored LSD experiment. All of the vocal samples come from the original audio recordings of that study. And Childhoods End is a reference to an Arthur C. Clarke book, which was a favorite of Kesey and his clan, who were known as the “Merry Pranksters”.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters traveled the US promoting free spirit and psychedelic drug culture in their travel bus they named “Furthur”. Kesey also wrote a play, “Twister,” which they preformed for during Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival in 1994.
Most notably known as a famous author, Ken Kesey was also a pioneer of the electronic music experience we familiarize ourselves with today. In the early 60s, Kesey would hold parties, which he called “acid tests,” involving music, black lights, neon paint, strobes, and other psychedelic effects (and yes, copious amounts of LSD), joined by the music of Ken’s friends, who we now know as the Grateful Dead. Much of what we love about our rave culture today is based on the fearless leadership of the counterculture movement of Kesey and his companions. Intrepid Travels can be seen as a tribute, or even a “furthuring,” of Kesey’s life journey, and to help educate and promote the basic foundation that expanded EDM to where it is today.
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Kesey and his Pranksters effectively laid the foundations and outlined the format of the modern electronic dance party phenomenon.
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Sound Strider’s music influences include Shpongle, Tool, Infected Mushroom, and Noisia.
Much like Ken Kesey, Sound Strider (Sam Waks) has his own unconventional life resume. Growing up in Sydney, his father as a top cellist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, he was surrounded by classical music early on. In high school he turned to the drums and joined both a jazz group and a garage band. It wasn’t until the 90s that Sam discovered the world of electronic music, where he dove in head-first into the Nu Skool Breaks scene in Sydney.From there Sam began to DJ at some of Sydney’s top clubs, and earned his degree in Audio Engineering. Now in France, Sam brought helped pave the way for its Free Tekno scene, playing for week-long “teknival” massives and underground all-nighters. Now focused on production, Sound Strider focuses on his music to be “pure psychedelic ethno-trigga funk for the information generation.”
Expect to hear more intricate digital and experimental flavor from Sound Strider in the coming months, including his latest Connect The Drops mixtape, which is described as “polished and distilled for maximum mindwave coherence.” You can download Sound Strider’s Intrepid Travels EP on Bandcamp for free or with a donation, so support him however you can – but don’t miss the bus for Intrepid Travels. This is one mind-journey into music you do not want to pass up.
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Sound Strider is an electronic artist with a truly underground ethos
and approach. Raised on a diet of classical music, Sam Waks (Sound
Strider) got a taste for touring at a young age travelling the world
with his father Nathan Waks principal cellist of the Sydney Symphony
Orchestra. Picking up the drums in high school he made his first
public performances with jazz group Swing Syndicate and garage rockers
Easy Meat. It wasn’t until the early 90’s that he discovered the sonic
possibilities of electronics and quickly rose to be a prominent member
of the Nu Skool Breaks scene in Sydney supporting the likes of Atomic
Hooligan, Chris Carter and Bass Kleph, playing club nights such as
Wanna Break, Kitt Katt and Break Inn. Around the same time he
completed an SAE diploma and developed a taste for production and
engineering. Credits from this period include live DnB band The Caca,
funk rappers The Alphabetics and his own rap group Hostile Wax. He
also became a staff writer for inthemix.com.au, Australia’s biggest
dance website publishing over 50 articles under the pen name E-Cue.
By 2008 he had also developed a strong interest in the doof scene
fusing his breakbeat roots with the psychedelic sounds of the bush and
becoming an early proponent of the Psybreaks genre as a member of the
Elixir collective. Barely a year later opportunity came knocking on
the other side of the pond and he embarked upon a foolhardy mission to
convert a 19th century agricultural ruin in France into a recording
studio and cultural venue.
5 Years later and the dream is becoming reality the studio having
already given birth to the acclaimed debut album Howlin by Jagwar Ma
as well as playing host to such diverse talents as the Midnight
Juggernaughts, Demi Portion, Christopher Hogwood and Uffie. On the
DJing and production front his years in France brought the discovery
of the thriving underground Free Tekno scene where he has played at
countless gatherings ranging from 30000+ week long “teknivals” to 50 man
all nighters in abandoned chateaus. He has also hosted events at his
property with scene luminaries such as Nawak and Triphase.
Sound Strider is the culmination of this eclectic voyage across the
electronic seas. Producing a unique melange of haute sonique from
only the finest waveforms, hand picked from the data forests and
lovingly blended with precision and flair. From organic analog body
grinders to intricate digital brain busters his spectral alchemy
conjures up outlandish aural landscapes laced with hypnotic
polyrhythms. Pure psychedelic ethno-trigga funk for the information generation.
Sound Strider’s 2013 releases include the “Intrepid Travels” EP andhis “Connect The Drops” mixtape, both formulations polished and distilled for maximum mindwave coherence and enhanced polycosmic targeting vectors before being released into the information ecology to spread and evolve.
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Follow Sound Strider:
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You can learn more about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters through the incredible documentary Magic Trip.
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