STAVO.NET
STAVO CRAFT musician: artist: writer: fabric shamanist: human potential advocate
Stavo Mustang Craft is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates compelling sonic worlds on the stylishly pimp budget of a new used shoe. Residing in enchanting Santa Fe, NM, he is the captain of the DIY Art Pop music project, Galactic Witchcraft.
Bang your invisible drum, Ye Mad Lad!
I am a writer of songs & illustrated stories, interpolation video artist, and fabric upcycle designer. These endeavors are undertaken as a primitive propagandist, to promote the very basic idea of living with an abundant sense of freedom and creative spirit ~ in part, as a route to producing Light on Earth from non-electrical sources.
My take on art is that the primary reason to create is to fascinate your own mind and spirit. It's a tool for how you uncover & undress life's mystery, and your own, while accessing your unique energetics as special magic powers. But I also appreciate that in doing so, the creations become a platform that helps others access their own otherness & individuation; to tinker with their toolset in developing their own incarnational patterns.
The essential recipe to the art of freeing the persona is: 1-part, the guiding principle of refined instinct, 1-part, forgetting, 2-parts, self-invention, and 1-heavy-dash of funista confetti.. which is akin to a fashionista, but with more style: that of revelry.
Utilizing this simple formula, I created a character, The Futurist from Inner Space, who embodies this "Invent Yourself" principle.
Persona is envisioned in the story as a Room without end, with The Futurist walking thru the Walls of the Mind in an ever-expanding concept of Being, amid immensely long hallways with open doors extending all the way down. He sees that everything which seems separate from us is actually woven together, not “like” relationships between harmonies, but exactly so. And as he unlocks the mysteries of consciousness, the magical glories of The Expanded Potential Self are accessed. It's the story of Becoming Your Own Highest Art Form & celebrating the Largeness of the Smallness of the Individual Life.
My initial music recordings tended to take on the voice of two central characters: The above Futurist from Inner-Space, who sends his messages across inner-world dimensions to guide the development of multiple selves (some of whom are presumably the listeners) into new evolutionary territories, and a second main character, The Krog, who travels the outer-space multiverse, not through his mind, but by physical interplanetary ‘crafts’, from which he serves as a Cosmic Social Scientist to assess and report his studies on various planets: their inhabitant's perils in developing as beings & the challenges of their growing civilizations, to one day join a larger Astral Citizenship with other worlds. The songs are predominantly written as an outgrowth of these storylines & were recorded on cassette tape with the idea of being discovered in the future.
Most of my creative work today is channeled into my Post New Wave DIY Synth artpop music project, Galactic Witchcraft on Future Room Records. The site features music & videos dealing with these ideas of self-activation of identity & the building of potential + imagined futures. And of course, lots of cosmic candies for your psychic ingestion.
EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO/SOUNDTRACK: "Godstorm"
While I love the simplicity of The 3 Minute Miracle of injecting delicious ideas into a pop song...
I'm also into being a sonic scientist tinkering in my studio, creating outlandish soundforms. On a related theme to Galactic WItchcraft perhaps, is this long-form sound:video piece called "GODSTORM: Art-Making as a Form of Ritual Witchcraft" from a collaboration with Brooklyn-based video artist Steven Boling, which developed out of a 20-minute instrumental 'environments' soundtrack I created up in the mountains of Maine. This segment linked above is a 7-minute excerpt from that, including the sections: "Elemental," "Invocation," and "Earthdance" ..which allows me to use some of my Whirling Dervish propensities.
PODCAST
PODCAST: on Working at Meow Wolf - "Stepping forward like a Unicorn"
"Stavo is many things to many people at Meow Wolf: Organizer, friendly ear, and renowned fire-putter-outter. He keeps the ship that is Meow Wolf's main production facility shipshape. Stavo also enjoys weaving conversation into fantastical realms of thinking... and this discussion is no exception! ENJOY!"
Or click here if you prefer to listen on IHeartRadio instead of Spotify.
About
Stavo Mustang Craft is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates compelling sonic worlds on the stylishly pimp budget of a new used shoe. He's performed his own brand of concept-driven music at historic venues like Angel Orensanz Center, the Tenement Museum of New York, Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, Merce Cunningham Studio, and CBGB's Gallery. Reaching well outside of music, his songs have served as soundtracks for modern dance and performance events in Australia, Amsterdam, Colombia, & NYC- simply by word of mouth- and one song (‘Walking On Water’) was the soundscape behind choreographer Kun Yang Lin's piece "Ky-lin", which earned an award from the Government of Taiwan for Creativity in Dance. Craft also branched out into professional theater as a co-writer, with celebrated novelist Sandra Hochman, on a stageshow called “Timmy The Great”, which was directed and choreographed by Tony-winner Savion Glover for the Tribeca Theater Festival. He now lives in Santa Fe, NM, the gleeful Captain of DIY Art Pop project, Galactic Witchcraft, whose "Fabric Statements" record was the runner-up for Best Pop Album of the Year at the 2018 New Mexico Music Awards, which annually honors recordings made in the state.