STAVO.NET
STAVO CRAFT musician: artist: writer: fabric shamanist: human potential advocate
Stavo Mustang Craft is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates worlds typically on the budget of a new used shoe, and has 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, of 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, honoring recordings made in the state. In 2019, a 50-song compendium volume of Stavo Craft 's cassette recorded demos, "BE OTHER: The Alien Pirate Radio Broadcasts" was digitally released.
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.
While a simple naturalist might say to just embrace what you are, I'm a 'supernaturalist' in believing you can often create & become what you want by embracing what you aren't yet. And while I create primarily to fascinate my own mind, I also know that in doing so, I provide a platform that allows people greater access to their otherness, individuation, & a toolset to build their own stage on which to fully incarnate. The essential path to this developmental freedom is summed up by the following recipe: 1-part, the guiding principle of refined instinct, 1-part, forgetting, 2-parts, self-invention, 1-part, funista.. which is like a fashionista, but of revelry.
From 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 (or space) without end, with its protagonist walking through the walls of the mind in an ever-expanding conception of Being. And he sees everything which seems separate from us is actually woven together, not “like” relationships between harmonies, but exactly so. And in unlocking this illusion of separation, the magical glories of The Potential Self are accessed. It's the story of Becoming Your Own Highest Art Form.
So my initial recordings tend to take on the voice of two central characters: The Futurist from Inner-Space, who sends his messages across inner-space 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 of various planets: their people’s perils in developing as beings, and 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 with the idea of being discovered in the future.
Now, most of my creative work is channeled into my 'Post New Age' NewWave DIY Synthpop music project, Galactic Witchcraft on Future Room Records. So I invite you to check out both sites, which include music (& accompanying videos for most songs), 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 a million ideas into a pop song..
I'm also into being a sonic scientist tinkering in my studio, creating outlandish soundforms, and just doing more challenging things. 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 skills.
