About Chris
Background
Chris Stapelberg grew up in South Africa and was strongly influenced by ethnic African music in his early years. He moved to Australia in 1992, where he began composing and producing electronic music in 1997.
He initially produced Dance and Drum and Bass with a strong ethnic influence, incorporating African percussion, but over the years he also developed a passion for Indian and Middle Eastern music. When World Beat and Chillout became widely known in Australia, having already been popular for a while in Europe, Chris realised that his music had found a home in these versatile genres.
Chris found that he could get more complex sounds by warping a sampled instrument rather than just creating riffs with synthesizers. By this time he was incorporating his own recordings of ethnic instruments into his works, including several instruments that he had designed and made himself. With time his music developed a rich organic character, while maintaining the loop-based feel of electronic music. Chris has always loved ethnic percussion, and increasingly he also experimented with different styles of percussion. He started creating his own brand of world beats, which have become the cornerstones for Shaia's compositions.
Collaborations
In 2001 Chris worked with the St. Cecilia’s Schola Gregorian Choir in Brisbane, Australia. He combined traditional Gregorian chants (often filtered or vocoded), with modern electronic sounds and laid-back breaks.
In 2004 he collaborated with a classically trained male Indian vocalist. This led to the realisation that ethnic vocals were able to transport his music to a new level of complexity. He began working with vocalists Anne Marie and Kuljit in late 2004 and later with Candice and Roshan.
Music genres such as Chillout and World Beat have progressed to encompass a wide spectrum of styles, ideas and geographic influences and have become especially liberal in their incorporation of traditional ethnic music, while often also representing the cutting edge of electronic music. They have attained a balance which, in Chris's opinion, not only expresses a growing awareness of global musical culture, but also a growing trend for musical composition into the future.
