Solt (2)

SOLT is an alias of an American composer and improviser, Michael Hartman, established in the early 2010s and dedicated to exploring odd time signatures and polyrhythms in electronic music. The project's primarily based on drum machines and synthesizers, inspired by a broad musical palette, from Japanese techno to Henry Cowell's seminal 1930 book, New Musical Resources. In February 2014, Solt released a digital single, Oreave, via Kuro Neko Music's label Free Downloads series. (ID3 tags suggested the track could be the opening single of the "Make a Salad" album, but the project never materialized.) Few months later, Solt performed live on 26 June 2014 at Smart Bar in Chicago, Illinois. In June 2020, Solt resurfaced with the "Basement Jam Excerpt" track released on Building A Better Reality: A Benefit Compilation compilation on Brent Gutzeit's label JMY. Later that year, Hartman began a new collaborative project around SOLT, composing four sketches and inviting some of his oldest friends to develop and further rework them into complete compositions. Participants included Todd Carter, Boris Hauf, members of dream-pop/experimental rock band The Father Costume, Vadim Sprikut as "Drowned," and Vadim Ugruymov, also known as Motor (whose album, Freeze CD, was the inaugural release on Hartman's label Kuro Neko in 2003). The resulting "remix" compilation album, Sketches, Paintings, came out in May 2022 on Boris Hauf's Berlin-based label, Shameless Records — released as a t-shirt with a download code, and all proceedings donated to the German Red Cross.