Pauline Anna Strom is an American electronic music composer and synthesist best known under the pseudonym Trans-Millenia Consort. Strom made seven recordings between 1982 and 1988 including three LPs and four cassette tapes. Her 1982 debut, Trans-Millenia Consort, was released on Ether Ship Records.
Early life
Strom grew up in a Southern Catholic family in Louisiana and Kentucky. Born blind, she learned to navigate the world largely on an auditory plane and to relate to the world through her other senses. During childhood, Strom showed an avid interest in classical music and fiction.
Career
Strom moved to the Bay Area in the early 1970s and embarked on a career in music by acquiring synthesizers and building compositions with a Tascam four-track recorder. She regularly worked with a Yamaha DX7, Prophet 10, two CS1x keyboards and an E-mu Emulator. Deprived of sight, she taught herself to compose intuitively. She explains, "I learned as I go. And I learned through repetition—I’d try something and see what I’d get and play with it that way…If someone asked me how I did it, I honestly couldn’t say how I did it, I just did it...I went into a different space...I’d start at six at night and I could go until six in the morning.” Strom's range of equipment allowed her flexibility in composition and she used this home work station to create 7 albums. She explains: “My mind and imagination were always somewhere else. Music fit. Synthesizers fit. I felt totally at home with this set up, almost like I’d known it before” Strom has said that she translates visual ideas into audio using her set up. She told FACT magazine, “I like to create what’s in my head and interpret that into sound." According to The Wire, her 1980's recordings included everything from visions of ancient civilizations to late nightdrone meditations. Calling herself the Trans-Millenia Consort, Strom mapped an inner world of imagined pasts, possible futures, and alternate realities. She sought to act as a "consort" for her audience, "spiriting listeners through epochs described by her evocative musical passages," according to the label, RVNG Intl. The ability to tap into, map, and translate an "inner world" into sound recalls Pauline's philosophy that everything in the now is rooted in the past, future and present. This approach extended across her seven albums.
Due to financial constraints, Strom sold all her equipment, stopped making music, and focused on building a spiritual healing practice. After a silent period musically, Trans-Millenia Music, compiled from three albums and four cassette tapes recorded from 1982 through 1988 was released by RVNG Intl. in November 2017. RVNG Intl. describes the album as “a collection of transportive synthesizer music providing listeners a vessel to break beyond temporal limits into a world of pulsing, mercurial tonalities and charged, embryonic waveforms.” The re-circulation of Pauline's music in 2017 was well received by the music press and prominent online magazines. The Wire magazine listed Trans-Millenia Music as No. 2 for Archive Releases of the Year in their 2017 end-of-year list. In an interview with FACT magazine following the release of Trans-Millenia Music, Strom stated that she is hopeful that soon she'll be able to get hold of a digital audio workstation capable of providing as many possibilities as her previous analogue setup and resume composing music. Pauline is currently a Reiki master, spiritual counselor, and healer living in San Francisco with her pet iguana, Little Solstice.
