Solar Express by 555

Chris Farstad, a core member of Minneapolis collective Food Pyramid, imparts that experience into his debut solo album, Solar Express. Exploring the tension between new age escapism and kinetic momentum, wielding psychic armor of pure laughter to disarm power and usher in new stories, the results are an album of dynamic exploration manifested as a synthesized fantasy of ambient environments, colliding percussion and time-based electronic composition.

555 profile
chris Farstad currently lives in New Orleans, LA with his wife. He is a founding member of Minneapolis-based synthesizer collective Food Pyramid and the album Solar Express is his solo debut.


555 is about ideas of intuition, spiritual attainment, the edge of chaos, a kind of new age revival idea, but done with percussion in the foreground. The 555 concept tries to function on the level of a metaphor as a resistance, embodying a philosophy of making oneself more powerful in relationship to power, maybe first through awareness, but then maybe through a shield, or a network, or just the right information. I’d like to think that the music could be interpreted as kind of healing ritual/act/impulse against the “modern environmental/terroristic security situation” vibe that exists today. Not quite like Todd Haynes’ movie Safe, if you’ve seen that, but kind of. As a name, 555: it’s just easy to remember and translates well. As far as Japanese art history and cultural translation goes, I would most align myself with the philosophy of the 1950s/60s Gutai group—synthesizing new forms and ideas on visual and musical planes.
Chris Farstad 2013

white paddy mountain is a small record label based in Japan.
Chihei Hatakeyama is A Sound Artist And Musician Living On The Outskirts Of Tokyo.
http://chihei-mastering.com/

chihei.org