Dennis Rea

Earthstar

In the late 1970s Rea made a series of albums in Germany with Earthstar, the brainchild of a fellow Utican, keyboardist/synthesist Craig Wuest. Influenced by the German electronic music scene of the 1970s, including Tangerine Dream, Harmonia, Popol Vuh, and Klaus Schulze (who would later produce the group’s 1978 album French Skyline), Earthstar was born out of the partnership of Wuest and the members of Zuir, plus other Utica-area musicians. In 1977 Earthstar was signed by Nashville-based Moontower Records, who released the group’s first album, Salterbarty Tales, the following year. With Schulze’s encouragement, Wuest moved to Germany in 1978, where he recorded French Skyline and a subsequent release, Atomkraft? Nein, Danke!, for Hamburg-based Sky Records [6][7]. Rea joined Wuest and other members of Earthstar in Germany in 1979 and 1980 for sessions at Schulze’s IC Studio and appeared on both releases, as well as the unreleased album Sleeper, the Nightlifer. Earthstar is notable as perhaps the only American band to participate in Germany's Kosmische Musik/electronic music scene while still at its height.[1][2][3]

1980s and 1990s - Seattle, NYC, China, Taiwan

In the early 1980s Rea collaborated with composer K. Leimer in his vanguard Seattle-based experimental music group Savant, described by Philip Sherburne in Pitchfork as “some of the most striking and original American electronic music of that period.”[8] In 1983 he moved to New York City for three years, where he was involved with the Downtown new-music community. Returning to Seattle in the late 1980s, he performed with various avant-rock bands (notably Color Anxiety and Fred) and became deeply involved in free improvisation alongside musicians such as Wally Shoup, Bill Horist, and Stuart Dempster. In 1988 he co-organized the first public edition (and numerous subsequent editions) of the Seattle Improvised Music Festival, which still continues 30-plus years later. That same year he served as the title character’s “sonic alter ego” in the cult feature film Shredder Orpheus.

Between 1989 and 1996 Rea spent several years in China and Taiwan, where he played more than 100 concerts at cultural centers, universities, conservatories, expat bars, religious celebrations, and underground happenings, on radio and television, and in sports arenas with the Chinese pop star Zhang Xing. His 1990 solo album for the state-run China Record Corporation, Shadow in Dreams, sold 40,000 copies and was cited among the year's 10 best releases by Party organ China Youth Daily. While abroad he organized three of the earliest unofficial concert tours of China by progressive Western bands (Identity Crisis, The Vagaries, and Land), playing more than 40 concerts in Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Kunming, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau, plus a performance at the 1991 Sichuan China International TV Festival viewed by a TV audience estimated in the hundreds of millions. He has performed with such influential Chinese musicians as Cui Jian, Wang Yong, Liu Yuan, Liang Heping, He Yong, ADO, and Cobra. He has also written extensively about Chinese and other Asian music in popular and academic publications including CHIME, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, and the Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music, and his adventures as a foreign musician in the Far East are chronicled in his book Live at the Forbidden City: Musical Encounters in China and Taiwan (Blue Ear Books, 2015).[4][9][10]

Back in Seattle in the mid-1990s, Rea formed or participated in dozens of groups and projects, among the more prominent being ethno-electronic ensemble Land, formed by Jeff Greinke, an ambient musician and composer Rea first met in Seattle in the early 1980s. Through its various incarnations the group also included trumpet player Lesli Dalaba, bassist Fred Chalenor, drummers Bill Rieflin and Greg Gilmore, Chapman Stick player George Soler, and others.[1][2][3] Between 1998 and 2001 Rea led the free-jazz quartet Stackpole, which won a Golden Ear award from Earshot Jazz magazine for Best Northwest Outside Jazz Group in 2000. [11] For 10 years he was also a key contributor to groups led by singer-songwriter Eric Apoe.

2000-present

Rea has remained active performing, composing, recording, and touring in the new century, gaining greater visibility through his association with NYC-based MoonJune Records, for whom he has released six albums to date: three with his primary band, the electric instrumental quintet Moraine; one each with free-jazz group Iron Kim Style and Jon Davis’s Asian-prog-fusion project Zhongyu; and the solo album Views From Chicheng Precipice, an unorthodox take on the traditional music of East Asia.[12] In addition to Moraine, he works with Ffej and Frank Junk in the electronically processed thumb-piano trio Tempered Steel, with Hawkwind founder Nik Turner and drummer Jack Gold-Molina in the improv project Flame Tree, and with various Seattle instrumentalists in his Tanabata Ensemble. During this period, Rea has undertaken two concert tours in Russia (MuzEnergo Tour) and two in Taiwan, and has also performed in Mexico, England, and Germany. With several partners, he founded the ongoing Seaprog festival of progressive/avant rock and the intermittent Zero-G Concert Series, both in Seattle.[5][13] Rea has been awarded grants for his musical activities by the U.S. Department of State (Fulbright-Hays program), Arts International Fund for U.S. Artists Abroad, Seattle Arts Commission, King County Arts Commission, Malcolm S. Morse Foundation, Jack Straw Foundation, and the Washington State China Relations Council.