Chris Strouth
Chris Strouth is an American, Minneapolis-based musician, producer, writer and filmmaker who has been active since 1986, most notably as the founder and organizer of 1990s/2000s electronica collective Future Perfect Sound System, and most recently as the bandleader and composer for experimental/electronic band Paris 1919. His behind-the-scenes production work includes Indianapolis multimedia artist Stuart Hyatt's Grammy-nominated album The Clouds. Strouth also gained national attention in 2009 when he received a life-saving kidney transplant from a donor who connected with him on Twitter, which is believed to be the first such transplant arranged entirely through social networking.
Early life
Strouth was raised in Fridley, Minnesota. He became interested in art and music at an early age, learning how to experiment with tape recorders at age seven.Strouth has been heavily involved in the Twin Cities arts and music community from a young age. His early work included curating multimedia events incorporating art and electronic music at underground art spaces including Rifle Sport Gallery, Hair Police and Red Eye Collaboration. The day after his high school graduation in 1986, Strouth began volunteering at Rifle Sport on Minneapolis' then-notorious Block E. He quickly became publicity director, and eventually managed the space. At the same time, Strouth was a member of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon's chapter at the University of Minnesota. On the podcast Legacy Matters, he said that even though his art-punk sensibility wasn't an obvious match for a straitlaced organization such as DKE, "I liked this idea of having a connection greater than myself. At a time when I was absolutely rootless, I needed something that gave me roots, because I didn't have family to connect to. It was really kind of powerful."
Music
As composer/performer
As a performer, Strouth has played in a range of styles including techno, jazz, and punk. He has also worked frequently as an organizer of entire scenes of bands, typified by the electronica collective Future Perfect Sound System, which he founded in 1995.Future Perfect Sound System
The collective was an important early exponent of electronic music and rave culture in the Midwest, receiving favorable comparisons to Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events. Future Perfect performed frequently at First Avenue nightclub, the Walker Art Center, Weisman Art Museum, and other galleries, with showcases that sometimes drew more than 30 performers, and released two albums, 1997's Music For Listening and 2001's The Nature of Time.Paris 1919
Strouth founded another musical collective, Paris 1919, shortly before his diagnosis with kidney disease in 2009. Strouth's compositions for the band often deal with his illness and recovery. For instance, the short piece "Blood Mountain," is about Strouth's experience on dialysis, and bases its core rhythms on those of dialysis machines. Paris 1919 began as a solo, studio-bound experiment in sonic collages; Strouth has described the music as sounding "weird and chaotic and structureless and purposely off-beat" but notes that it is also created from a painstaking process which may involve more than 1,000 edits. It grew into a semi-improvisational live band with a rotating membership, which has performed a series of multimedia shows combining music, theater and dance in immersive environments, often working with choreographer Deborah Jinza Thayer. 2014's "Antarctica" used the theme of an ice cave to explore Strouth's journey through his kidney ailment and recovery. The same year’s "Safe As Houses" placed both performers and audience in a giant dollhouse as a metaphor for the housing crisis and Strouth’s own loss of his home the year before.Paris 1919 has also recorded four albums. Book Of Job was released in 2011 on Go Johnny Go Records; two others, Antarctica and Collected Short Fictions, are still unreleased. In 2018, Strouth released Risking Light, a soundtrack album to director Dawn Mikkelson's documentary about forgiveness. Although credited to Paris 1919, the album was written and performed by Strouth as a solo work.
Strouth has also frequently led Paris 1919 in creating live soundtracks to silent films, including Alfred Hitchcock's , and the 1930 mystery The Bat Whispers at the 2014 Minneapolis Comic-Con.
Other projects
In 2011, Strouth was a conductor for the four-act opera Czeslaw’s Loop, performed live on a floating barge on the Mississippi River, which included performers as diverse as classical soprano Maria Jette, techno-pop group Information Society's Paul Robb, and Tom Hazelmyer of the punk band Halo of Flies.Other projects include The Snaildartha 6's 2004 jazz and spoken-word holiday album , which Strouth composed and produced with saxophonist George Cartwright of the jazz group Curlew and co-writer Matt Fugate. Strouth's early band King Paisley and the Pscho-del-ics performed at Rifle Sport and released a nine-song album in 1986, Death Rockin’, which was re-released in 2011 on Go Johnny Go.
As producer
Besides composing and performing music, Strouth founded his own label, UltraModern Records, in 1995, and was the director of artists and product at two other influential Minneapolis labels, Twin/Tone Records and Innova Recordings. At Innova, Strouth worked on albums by dozens of artists including Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, Beat Circus, Matthew Burtner, George Cartwright, Victoria Jordanova, Phillip Johnston, and Hyatt's Grammy-nominated album The Clouds. Twin/Tone, already nationally prominent thanks to a roster including alternative-rock pioneers The Replacements, grew to develop an umbrella relationship with a dozen smaller indie labels, including UltraModern.UltraModern focused on neo-psychedelic, indie-pop, and noise/electronic rock, releasing albums by musicians including ex-Wall Of Voodoo leader Stan Ridgway, jazz guitarist Skip Heller, Future Perfect Sound System, Ousia, and Savage Aural Hotbed. UltraModern received wider distribution through partnerships with Twin/Tone, Atomic Theory Records, and New West Records. The label's catalog includes:
Film and television
Strouth's documentary , filmed in 2008 and released in 2009, covered the contentious 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. The film edits together a wide variety of film and video shot by dozens of independent journalists and citizen videographers with divergent political viewpoints, compiling a mosaic of perspectives on the four days of the convention. Unconvention was one of eight full-length features chosen to debut as part of the "Minnesota Made" series at the 2009 Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Film Festival.Strouth and Minneapolis filmmaker Rick Fuller also co-produced a DVD companion to Stan Ridgway's Holiday in Dirt album featuring 14 short films based on Ridgway's songs, which was released in 2005. In 2006, they co-produced the documentary The M-80 Project, which chronicled a 1979 New Wave music festival at the Walker Art Center.
From 1994 to 1996, Strouth produced the documentary series What, which covered the Minneapolis pop and rock scene, for Twin Cities public television station KTCA.