G.E.N.E. - Visionary Voyager

G.E.N.E. was born in June 1987, sometime during a late-night conversation around a campfire in the Canadian woods. As might be expected in such setting, the talk ranged freely - over nature and technology, the world and the machine, new digital sounds and old emotional needs. That night, Vancouver-born Cleo de Mallio took the first steps on a musical odyssey that is still unfolding. "Visionary Voyager" is a fond look back at early ports of call.

Through seven years and eight CD's, de Mallio has taken G.E.N.E. around the world and back again, from North Woods (Life is a Melody) to the tropics (Rain Forest), from the American Southwest (Katchina) to the Indian Ocean (Diving Dreams). Her mission: create new music at the intersection between nature and technology, music that would unite the recording studio with world around us.

De Mallio takes the sounds of nature - the rustle of surf on a Mediterranean shore, the hum of insect in a rain forest - and processes them in the studio, "as if I were mixing colors on a palette". What she achieves is and ambient counterpoint in the music of each cut - a journey of the sprint to the exotic places of the earth.