Solenoid is a Portland (Oregon-USA) based electronic music composer who has explored a variety of genres. Informed by electro, new wave, jazz, disco, noise, metal, classical, and avant garde music, his releases do have common elements when seen as a whole. Tracks usually feature playful and funky percussion and melodic progressions with some signature warbly synthesizer sounds. Solenoid’s music develops a kind of baroque ‘maximalism’ (where most electro/techno/house/disco defaults toward minimalism) much in the vein of early Detroit techno.

Titles make references to film, sci-fi, technology, literature, synthesizers and musicology. 90’s releases lean toward shuffling, skittering funk with 80’s influences, occasionally exploring non-4/4 rhythms. The first 3 albums contain work compiled from a period several years earlier and are often identified with the first generation of US “IDM” artists, though the spirit of experimentation is more akin to free jazz and prog-rock ideas of time signature and melodic structure rather than sonic experimentation. An early issue of Grooves called Solenoid “the American answer to Mouse On Mars”.
As part of a free-improv duo, Office Products, and as Mr. Pharmacist, his experimentation of purely sonic ideas is explored under other project names. Post-2002 releases do reintroduce some ‘difficult’ noise/experimental elements while simultaneously going for more straightforward house/techno sounds.  Much of the percussion programming of Solenoid’s music contains detailed accents that suggests a live drummmer. Solenoid is known to use a drum pad when playing live or DJing.

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