On January 9th 1979 the wily zygote found itself in its final summation- split, nurtured, upside down and with a stunning vertebra ready to greet its host for the first time face to face. A healthy fetus, covered with birth's finest birthday suit juice, unfurled to finally taste oxygen. Conception's final frontier. At first awakening it cried, writhed and gleamed with the essence of the Beginning. Nurses clapped, doctors commended each other and insurance premiums grew. But of course you're not reading this because you fell asleep during The Miracle of Birth, or even to get a sense of the ER. If you're not a test tube experiment funded by the government, chances are you've gone through this already. No no, what you are here for is to revel in the coming of the 21st century's premiere vixen of C-sound ambient music...

Severine Charlotte Baron

Sev, as she's called bipedally by friends and colleagues, is capable of the most transfixing and euphoric atmospheres this side of the womb. Beautifully disturbing as well as Orca-calling, Sev's sonic down comforters can make any John Cage novice quit music school and become a Nyquil addict. A taffy stretcher of the finest sine waves, her music can massage the skins on the eardrums of any self-anthropomorphized android looking to defrag its life. Solid State geeks will wander, minimalists will mingle and stoners may soar, but Baron's music is in its own class of ambient music. In fact, if Eric Satie composed musical furniture, Severine creates musical sense-depravation tanks. With everything from C-sound to Logic, Soundhack to blah, blah, blah and a rich taste for synthesis mutation at her fingertips, Baron's work shows how binary next to French can be the most alluring yet challenging language to harness.

If Richard D. James has bastard children who carry on his forte for classical piano, Sev may very well qualify. Of course, Severine may be born of truer Alien and Gelfling DNA than even Richard would concoct. Paralleled with sheer virtuosity on the ebony and ivories, her piece "Out! I Said"mildly reflects her piano days in a short Reason-sequenced piece akin to Chopin going through an exorcism.

On the remix of the Woven song Soul Fossa, she beautifully mutilates four samples of the original and turns them into the slow Om of a G4 spiked with the enkephalin of a few Zen Buddhists. "The dream" is Jonny, one of the song's vocalists on a serious poppy seed holiday. Thanks for asking. Her talent for granular synth-moding is a true testimony to what happens when out-of-body experiences somehow find their way into computers. Till this day she cannot stop conversing with the voices. Her therapist and dealer (software, of course) says she's gonna be just fine. Nevertheless, being farthest from anything post-hippie or New Age, Sev's strange proclivity for astral projection has inspired a lot of these C-sound pieces. And thank you for choosing Air Baroness...

The Sirens of today have a new medium. The modern Pandora's Box is now a laptop, and The Mists of Avalon have all been digitized, low passed and time compressed. Where once there needed placenta, gurney and strain, now trequires hard drive space and endless imagination. Severine Baron's work gives birth to new atmosphere. And where there is fresh air you need only ears to breathe it.

Written by Steve Abagon