Stephen Emmer is a musician/ composer from Amsterdam, Holland who spent his 60s youth partially in India learning how to play a local windinstrument in an ashram, then he moved to the Caribbean to get taught voodoo percussion as a boy. Back in Amsterdam in the 70s he got involved in various bands such as an experimental free jazz group, a symphonic rockgroup and an avantgarde new wave electro-noise group called Minny Pops. His musical idealism made him create and produce a solo mini-album in the early 80s called Vogue Estate where he was joined by several guestartists from the UK such as the late Billy MacKenzie, Martha Ladley and Michael Dempsey. The album was one of the first intentional Soundtracks Without a Film. After having briefly joined several UK bands such as Lotus Eaters, Act and the Associates, he once again went home and got involved in productionmusic for most of the 90s, a.o. becoming the first inhouse-composer for both the main public and commercial tv-broadcasters in the Netherlands. Succesfull yet hardened and professionally seasoned by these involvements around 2006 he felt a sudden urge to liberate himself from this ‘musical warzone’ of demanding and undemanding clients who were more and more requiring the productionmusic to be musically safe under the pressure of audience-ratings. He decided to return to his musical idealism of the early years and found what he was searching for: inspiration through catharsis and created 16 compositions based on literary text-fragments. The music follows no rules out-of-the-book yet refers to very different musical genres, styles and even cliche’s as experienced and learned by Emmer in both his idealistic and commercial musical periods.
Or as his producer Tony Visconti puts it: ‘Stephen Emmer is one of those musicians/ composers who knows the musical rules best and therefore also how to break them.’