Music | dougbielmeier

SynthFest - Northeastern, May 2025

Arlington Street Church - Boston, MA - October 12th 2024

Square Cat Vinyl, Indianapolis, August 2018

SynthFest - Northeastern, May 2025

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Discography

Bielmeier's performance on the Lap Steel Guitar and Push interface creates immersive soundscapes that defy genre boundaries in a mesmerizing fusion of electronic, experimental, Hip-Hop, and ambient. Bielmeier skillfully blends live sampling and synthesis techniques, seamlessly weaving together pulsating break beats and ethereal drone landscapes. Each performance is a dynamic exploration of sonic possibilities.

Discography

Electric Rodeo Revival

November 2025, Voidstar Productions, Boston

Music for Billionaires

October 2023, New Focus Recordings
Composer Doug Bielmeier’s fourth full length album places contemporary chamber music in a wider stylistic context that includes ambient and dance electronica. Drawing on his extensive activity as a recording engineer and producer, Music for Billionaires features chamber works performed by Hypercube and Unheard-of//Ensemble, two active New York based contemporary music groups, alongside five experimental electronic pieces. The diversity of styles puts each medium in relief against the other — the timbral vitality and individuated expressive world of mixed ensemble works versus the controlled sculpting that the electronic realm affords creators.

Moreover, Music for Billionaires has an underlying meta-concept embedded within its program. Bielmeier engages with the question of access and equity that surrounds the esoteric world of contemporary composition. By combining two “new music ensemble” works with music that points to a more commercial arena, Bielmeier prompts questions about presenting modern music, context, and access to the avant-garde world for the general public.

Wells, ME opens the collection with a wash of shimmering sounds, as discrete timbres within a sound mass emerge to the fore and... more
credits
released October 27, 2023

Ambient Works

May 2021 on Albany Records, Ambient Works charted #1 on the North American College and Community Radio Chart (NACC) on the Chill Genre in the summer and fall of 2021. The album was developed through improvisation and studio sessions over 15 year period 2005-2020 in notable spaces: The Electroacoustic Studios at Bowling Green University, OH; the C.L.E.A.R. Lab at the Purdue School of Engineering, IN; Studio A in Washington, DC; Studio B at MTSU, Nashville, TN; and Shillman Studios at Northeastern University, Boston.

Ambient Works serves as a musical travelogue of experiments in the world of electroacoustic, ambient, and experimental music. Each piece serves to punctuate Bielmeier’s eclectic industry and academic career path, with his current destination being Boston, where Bielmeier is currently an associate professor at Northeastern University. This “best of” compilation was carefully curated to create a cohesive and fresh statement revealing the creator’s innovative process of Windowing: the manipulation, layering, and temporal placement of found sound files to create larger sonic landscapes. The album expands the ethos of commercial ambient music in tracks like “Another Pilot Down” and “No Time,” while extending the definition of a soundwalk piece in tracks such as “Photo Lab Sanctuary” and “Manumed.” The album is rounded out by a fresh take on a Schaefferian sound object montage in “St. Martin’s Summer.” Bielmeier explains, “The album reveals the context and emotion often missing in modern computer and electroacoustic music.”

Monophonic

2020 (S.E.A.M.U.S. Records)
The Beast

The SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States) Electroacoustic Miniatures Series is a semi-annual album release of fixed-media works addressing a specific theme per each iteration. 2020's theme, Monophonic, teases out the ‘miniatures’ genre, inviting submission of works 3 minutes max. in length, that were created to be experienced in a monophonic format.

Composers featured in this compilation are:

Aine Nakamura
Robert McClure
Matthew and Timothy Polashek
Simon Hutchinson
Sean Hallowell
Jake Sandridge
Doug Bielmeier
Stephen Lilly
Nicola Frattegiani
Joo Won Park
Fabio Fabbri
Drew Smith
Ralph Lewis

Orphans in the Heartland

November 2019, Unheard//of
CCI Sessions, vol. 1

This limited release, informal album highlights, workshop recordings, and session reads from Unheard-of//Ensemble's first Collaborative Composition Initiative. Each work was written and developed for Unheard-of//Ensemble in collaboration with CCI composition faculty Erin Rogers, also featured on saxophone. All proceeds go towards funding our second workshop in the summer of 2020.

Orphans in the Heartland for (Pn, Cl, Cmp, Vln, and Vc) explores the combination of a fixed macro-musical structure with that of performer determined micro-musical structure. The piece evolves over 6 minutes by the performers, who determine the repetition and ordering of small musical phrases written for each instrument. The fixed computer part serves as an anchor for timing and dynamic/rhythmic growth. The aim is to allow the performers to become co-authors of the work: making each performance unique, yet having a similar over-arching shape.

Recorded at Stony Brook University
Staller Recital Hall, August 13-18, 2019
Engineers: Sebastian Zel, Ford Fourqurean, and Matheus Souza

Beast of Bodmin Moor

September 2019 - Independent

Released on Labor Day, 2019, The album features collaborations with composer and media artist Michael Drews, composer and performer Eric Salazar, and Boston-based digital glitch artist Allison Tanenhaus.

The album contains 7 tracks featuring deep drone/ambient landscapes, beat driven electronica, chorale work, and Bielmeier performing on processed lap steel and vocals.The album is thematic named after the phantom wild cat purported to live in Cornwall, England. In 1978, Bodmin Moor became the center of purported cats sightings and occasional reports of mutilated slain livestock. The alleged panther-like cats indigenous to the region became popularly known as the Beast of Bodmin Moor. The Beast is an allegory for fear in our daily lives and how it effects our decisions, society, and purpose. The album sonically explores the states of anxiety, uncertainty, hope, and transfiguration.

Mind & Machine

August 2018 - Ravello Records

MIND & MACHINE: Organic and Electronic Works (Vol. 1) is the first of many electro-acoustic compilations to be released on RAVELLO RECORDS. Featuring the work of seven composers on six tracks, MIND & MACHINE explores the incredible range of works that can be categorized as electro-acoustic, a music in which styles are dictated by the technology that is at the heart of its performance.

Costa Mesa Rocking Chair
This Experimental Electronic Music for live processing, Lap steel, and fixed audio and video is the studio version of live performances conducted in 2017 for the release of the album, “Betty and the Sensory World (Ravello RR7972).” The work reimagines the music from the album and brings these sonic landscapes into the performance realm. The practice of windowing , used in the original work, deals with the manipulation of found sound files by the stretching and compression of time, sample rate, bit depth, and window size. The layering and temporal placement of these windows create larger sonic landscapes for the creation of new musical works divorced from the source context. Costa Mesa Rocking Chair pushes this concept of windowing further by windowing the live performance of the Lap Steel to add a more active component to this compositional approach.

Betty and the Sensory World

August 2017 - Ravello Records

Composer Douglas Bielmeier’s BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD is an enveloping musical work that soothingly twists time into a languid river of sound. Along these lines, BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD unfolds as one massive work that, though it may be marked in seven constituent sections, flows with very little delineation from one movement to another. This is not to say, however, that BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD is static or overly repetitive. Rather, Bielmeier’s creation simply exists on an atypically large scale, which demands the kind of gradual, almost furtive, evolution of musical ideas that characterizes this work.

BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD is an electronic composition, crafted meticulously to be performed, as it were, through the listener’s headphones or sound system. This format gives Bielmeier an opportunity to put his prodigious gifts as an audio engineer on display, and the tectonic scale of the work’s transformations makes it easy for his audience to soak up the intricate detail of his sonic design. One of the most impressive characteristics of BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD, and one that is relatively easy to identify and appreciate, is Bielmeier’s control of the stereo field, or the way he simulates space in distance in the production of the music. At any point in the piece, close your eyes listen to where the sounds are coming from. You should be able to hear ideas occurring all around you, moving left to right, getting closer and more present, and drifting off into the distance. The amount of skill, detail, and care Bielmeier dedicated to this aspect of the piece is palpable, and it lends BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD uncommon three-dimensionality.

Of course, the actual sounds Bielmeier uses to populate the piece are also effortlessly engaging. Because BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD focuses on concréte sounds, the listener will recognize sounds – such as church bells – among the vast array of processed and synthesized material that dominates the work. Although the language of the piece is, overall, rather abstract, the glacial pace of the music’s flow enables the listener to enter the world of every idea and become familiar with it, regardless of its quality. Combined with the potent use of space in Bielmeier’s production, these qualities make listening to BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD feel like the kind of true journey we so often seek from musical works, but so rarely find satisfactorily.