Unknown Rockstar

The current alias Sam Stephens, a musician currently based in New Zealand, uses for most of his solo work. He is an instrumental performing and recording artist.... working with known, unknown, and experimental elements to create recordings of interest to those who are curious about the manifestations of sound. The Unknown Rockstar is at heart an improvisor, and the albums he releases are single or multi track improvisations, or assembled from improvisations.

	You Are Beautiful Reeds drone, string rattle, lines play past one another. Rattle and groan. Bombast and clank.
	Delead Git Gloopy, noisy, harmonic slabs of rich round sound roast and ferment.
	Endless and Unreal Sounds build and mutate from scritch and scree, squeak and clank, to intensity, rupture and roar, whilst maintaining their enigma and inscrutability.
	Bare Winter Trees A longform guitar improvisation. Spiralling, steely, overtone rich guitar lines and loops create a variety of cold, metallic, but murky spaces. Emotions, sentimentality and the odd surprise arise.
	Rotten Bunny A couple of guitar improvisations. Recognizably the guitar, but strange and detached, not always comprehensible.
	Live At Audio Foundation and Aotea Gallery 2017 Two live Unknown Rockstar sets, one noise and one ambient.
	Ethereal Leap Overlord The sounds of circuits and strings layer, combine and mutate to calming and transcendent effect.
	Another Year Older And Deeper In Deeper in what exactly? Deeper enmeshed, deeper commitment to the consequence of decisions, deeper related to the world?
	Found pianos of Capitol Hill "I was walking through Capitol Hill, Seattle one weekend, and encountered an abandoned piano at the side of the road..."
	Let the Good Times Roll Some guitar playing, some drone. All very cheerful, of course.
	Ambivalence A pair of raw guitar improvisations.
	Untouched Mind Hypnotic, dreamy, confrontational, complex - the album travels through many moods and styles. An assemblage.
	Pictures of Poodles The Unknown Rockstar continues his exploration of the drone and the echo, using guitar, keyboard and electronics to build rippled and whorled sound tapestries that distort and fragment around the listener.
	Pickel Two contrasting tracks of live echo guitar recorded on the 28th of April, 2007. Potato Pickel is bluesy, and Rice Pickel builds shimmering overtones layers from echo blurring.
	Deep Earplug Music Recorded live at the first Deep Earplug Music at Happy on the 18th of June, 2006. This was a feedback piece for two amps, two guitars, a bass, a drum, some cymbals, and various effects.
	Fake Ivory A double CD of improvised piano, influenced by classical music, jazz, and the avantgarde. Recorded on the sly in Massey Conservatorium of Music practice rooms on a day of September 2004.
	Sound Board an album of beautiful, relatively sparse instrumental playing, on acoustic and electric guitar and on clarinet. The instrumental methods and modes developed through the Tangent Precipitate era are bought to a more focused conception of improvisation and sound under the guise of this new persona.