I'm Paul Stillwell, a musician and photographer based in Toronto. I've been making electronic sound since 1993, and a camera has never been far from it. The longer I work at both, the more they feel like a single practice: whatever the medium, I'm on the same edge, the transition between darkness and light, where each requires the other to be felt.

Photography

Black and white has always been how I see, but I only began taking the work seriously in 2021, in the quiet of the pandemic. That's when it deepened into film, the darkroom, and printing by hand. My photographs are mostly landscape and nature; I work with both film and digital. In film I focus on medium and large format, but the real work happens later, one sheet at a time: silver gelatin, and kallitype, a historic process from the 1890s. A print is a performance that explores the relationship between light and shadow captured by the sensor or the film. Getting that balance right, the play of texture, contrast, and the threshold between tones, is the craft. This is where the photograph transitions from record into art and becomes a physical thing to hold and experience.

Music

I perform solo, as one half of Not Your Average Worker Bees (long-form ambient with David Sutherland, dark ambient leaning into Berlin School), and since 1995 I've been a member of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble, the oldest continuously performing live electronic group in the world. It's nearly all improvised; I'd rather leave room for something emotional or unexpected to arrive than nail everything down in advance. I gravitate to the more esoteric instruments: modular systems, Ciat-Lonbarde, Soma. Though there's always room for a good keyboard synth!

Sonically, I lean toward dark, powerful sounds. However, power and darkness on their own are simply monotony without precision and intricacy. I am always searching for the balance, or the tension and transitions, between dark and light.

I also mix and master for other artists, mostly in experimental and Berlin School electronic music. The job there isn't to impose my own sound; it's to find theirs and clear everything else out of its way, to enhance the story they're already telling. Craft in service of someone else's atmosphere.

I also founded and host Frequency Freaks, Toronto's monthly synthesizer workshop, now in its tenth year. I started it to encourage people to learn synthesis, and to support the city's communities of builders, performers, and makers exploring new instruments and new ways to play them. The workshops are free and open to anyone, from accomplished knob-twiddlers to the merely curious.

The thing I'm proudest of is how many people have given their first performance, or their first electronic performance, at Frequency Freaks, because the community we've built is an open and welcoming place to take that risk.

The thread

Some days I'm after the balance between dark and light, some days I play back and forth across that threshold, other days I work the tension between them. I've come to think that in life and in practice it takes all three to keep one whole. It's the same instinct whether I'm making a photograph, performing, or designing a sound: the same pursuit of texture and atmosphere, the same patience to stay with it until it feels right.