About Har...

The Short Story:

Har is an American solo ambient artist and guitarist/bassist/Chapman Stickist for the experimental art-rock band Christus and The Cosmonaughts (Beta-Lactam Ring Records recording artists). Har has also recorded with artists such as elmodic, The Wretch, Mariel and others. Har is also the host of the weekly online dark-ambient radio show "Nightscaping" on Stillstream.Com.

The Long Boring Story:

The first albums Har ever owned as a very young child were Tangerine Dream's "Rubycon" and The Sandal's instrumental surf classic "Soundtrack to 'The Endless Summer'" that he inherited from his older brother and sister...which may explain a few things about his somewhat warped taste in music. This, combined with first seeing the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" at a very early impressionable age, was most likely the source of his life-long fascination with music and sounds that could generate vivid mental "visual" imagery whenever heard.

Har started his life as a musician with formal piano lessons from age 7 through 17. At age 15 he started learning guitar and bass from a school friend of his who was learning to play at the same time, and they started their first band that only played in Har’s parent’s living room. Har’s friend eventually gave up on music after finding a deeper interest in collecting guns, selling Har his guitar and bass so he could buy ammo.

At age 16 Har bought his first synthesizer, an ARP Odyssey, and a year after graduating high-school started playing professionally as a keyboardist/guitarist/bassist/vocalist in quite a few bands on the local cover-band circuit throughout the 80’s and 90's.

But "doing the 'Human Jukebox' thing" ultimately grew tiring for him over time, as he felt increasingly bored with playing other people's music; he was also incredibly frustrated with the idea of "writing a hit" and catering to whatever was deemed popular/trendy in the music industry when trying to create original music within a group context. Around 2002 Har decided to instead focus his energies on recording his own music. In 2005 he also started playing the Chapman Stick, a ten string extended-range instrument that expanded his musical pallette even further.

Fascinated and inspired by Robert Fripp's legendary Frippertronics technique of using a single processed/looped guitar as its primary sound source, Har began to move away from keyboards/synths and instead started to experiment with using highly processed guitars, basses and Chapman Stick as the source of the sounds in his music. Doing so seemed to feel more "organic" (for want of a better word) to him - using the raw sound of fingers on strings as the core tone, instead of electronic oscillators and samples.

Blessed/cursed with a photographic memory of his dreams and nightmares going all the way back to when he was a toddler, Har began to draw from this vivid, unusually complex and sometimes disturbing imagery as a source of inspiration for his music - which in turn started to focus on a more textural direction where traditional melody and structure may or may not always be relevant to the overall sonic "landscape" Har was trying to create.

Locally, Har's musical efforts were either ignored or in some cases considered worthy of scorn by his fellow area musicians ("Huh, so you just want to make 'niche music', eh? You'll never get rich and played on the radio doing THAT, so why bother?").
But the much more open-minded online international music community started taking notice of this "un-guitarist" with a reputation for being able to create unusual, unique sounds that worked well in a variety of different musical genres, and Har was asked to collaborate with numerous independent artists interested in having what was beginning to become his trademark sound - highly textural ambient guitar soundscapes - be part of their own music.

Around 2003 Har ultimately joined forces with synthesist/sound designer/writer/Computer Music Magazine contributor Scot Solida as the epic "post-apocalyptic psychedelic art rock" band Christus & The Cosmonaughts, and its instrumental space-rock "alter-ego", The Prayer Capsule. Signed to Beta-Lactam Ring Records, C&TC released their 2007 album "From Atop This Hill" to very positive reviews world-wide.

2007 also marked the release of Har's well-received first solo ambient album Dream Tower Blueprints performed entirely on software-processed guitar and Chapman Stick, and has had tracks from it played on NPR’s Star's End and Hearts of Space radio shows, as well as the 24/7 all-ambient online radio station Stillstream.Com.

Fast forward to 2010: Har began hosting "Nightscaping", a weekly radio show on Stillstream.com (every Sunday night starting at 6:30pm Eastern / 5:30pm Central) with a focus on the more dark and mysterious corners of the ambient music universe, where he often also does live-in-the-studio improv solo performances as well as "spinning the ambient hits".

In 2010 well-known electronic/ambient music luminary, Recording Magazine editor/writer and fellow Stillstream host Mike Metlay invited Har to take part in the 10th mindSpiral space-music concert, which took place on April 24th 2010 at The Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Har joined Mike Metlay and synthesist Darwin Grosse to perform an elaborate meeting of space music and digitally generated visuals (provided in real-time by Dr. Trace Reddell, Associate Professor of Digital Media at The University of Denver), before both an enthusiastic live audience at The Fiske Planetarium, and to listeners world-wide during the concert's live broadcast on Stillstream.com.

Har's long-awaited second solo album, Obscura was released in June 2010. Still focusing on escewing synths for guitars and Chapman Stick (as well as the addition of 8-string bass and tabla), The album marks a shift towards mostly hardware-based processing which inspired a decidely much more dark, mysterious and sometimes ominous atmosphere.

Har lives with his wife and four cats in Southeastern Pennsylvania.