American composer and sound designer Kim Cascone may be more recognizable in his former role as head of Silent Records, the label he founded in the mid-'80s, but his recordings as Spice Barons, Thessalonians, PGR, and, most often, Heavenly Music Corporation or his own name, have been equally as visible. A soundtrack composer throughout the early '80s before striking out on his own, Cascone formally studied electronic music arrangement and composition at the Berklee College of Music in the early '70s before studying in with Dana McCurdy at Manhattan's New School in 1976. Subsequently working as assistant musical supervisor under director David Lynch on both Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart, Cascone left Hollywood for San Francisco in the mid-'80s to pursue solo composition, forming Silent Records in 1986 after self-releasing his first PGR album, Silence. Though far more abrasive and conflicted than much of his later work, PGR's use of texture and compositional chance is a constant throughout the whole of Cascone's oeuvre. A number of PGR titles followed -- both on Silent and the RRRecords, Noctovision, and Permis de Construire labels -- and Cascone has since gone on to record primarily as Heavenly Music Corporation, releasing the bulk of his work through Silent. Deriving the name from the seminal recording by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp on their 1973 collaboration No Pussyfooting, HMC's focus, with some exceptions, has been on beatless ambient, beginning in 1993 with In a Garden of Eden (composed just prior to the birth of Cascone's son, Cage), and working through a series of releases in the mid-'90s. Working toward increasingly abstract aural sculptures, HMC's dabbling with the club culture most new ambient composers look to for inspiration has stretched no further than the sparse rhythms that pervade Consciousness III and some of Lunar Phase, with the lion's share of his material drawing from early electronic and musique concrète composers such as Morton Subotnick, John Cage, and Luciano Berio. Cascone left Silent in 1996 to pursue design and composition at Headspace, a multimedia company started by Thomas Dolby. [See also: Kim Cascone, PGR] ~ Sean Cooper