Emerald Web

As Emerald Web, the production and composing team of Bob Stohl and Kat Epple helped pioneer electronic music as new age ambiance with their textured, meditative film and TV scores, live event and venue music, and original releases that incorporated not only synthesizers but components like electronic wind instruments side by side with their acoustic counterparts. At times, the duo also arranged voice into their compositions. Active from 1977 to 1989, they made a mark on '80s new age and progressive music alike with albums like Dragon Wings and Wizard Tales (1979) and Nocturne (1983), which drew on experimentation and classical, environmental, and pure fantasy inspirations. Emerald Web's final album, Manatee Dreams of Neptune, was released in 1990 following Stohl's accidental death. Renewed interest in the couple's music in later decades led to releases like 2013's The Stargate Tapes 1979-1982 and subsequent remasters of their catalog. Emerald Web was formed in Connecticut in 1977 by married couple Bob Stohl and Kat Epple. The two had met at a jam session at the University of Florida earlier in the decade. Both of them keyboard and flute players before learning the intricacies of synthesizers, they began their foray into electronic music with the purchase of an Electronic Music Labs SynKey 2001. By 1979, they had recorded their debut album, Dragon Wings and Wizard Tales. Part-ambient and part-psychedelic, it arrived on the project's own Stargate label. The following year, Stohl and Epple relocated to the San Francisco Bay area and put out two cassettes, Whispered Visions and Sound Trek. Emerald Web continued to release albums at a steady pace in the early '80s, with Valley of the Birds and Aqua Regia following in 1981 and 1982, respectively, as their sound became more atmospheric and meditative without losing its experimental, textural qualities. The year 1983 brought the Jay Scott Neale collaboration Love Unfolding and their own long-player, Nocturne, which marked their debut on Fortuna Records. Lights of the Ivory Plains followed on the label in 1984. In the meantime, Emerald Web provided live music for venues like planetariums, observatories, museums, and zoos, as well as a wide variety of events such as science fiction conventions, where they honed their improvisational and compositional skills with an array of synthesizers, among them Moogs and the ARP 2600. The Grammy-nominated Catspaw LP followed on Audion Recording Co. in 1986, the same year Stargate issued the Emerald Web collection Traces of Time: A Musical Anthology. The 1987 documentary Together to Mars? featured an original score by the duo. Another Stargate release, Dreamspun, continued to explore their distinctive mixture of flutes and eclectic synth timbres in 1988. Around this time, the duo relocated back to Florida. After recording Manatee Dreams of Neptune, widely regarded as a career highlight, Stohl died in a drowning accident in 1989. A multi-format release of the record followed on Scarlet Records in 1990. Epple continued to perform, compose, and release music as a solo artist as well as oversee Emerald Web's master tapes. The Stargate Tapes 1979-1982 appeared on Finders Keepers and B-Music in 2013. As younger generations discovered their music, a series of reissues and original album masters were restored, digitized, and remastered in the 2010s and 2020s.
© Marcy Donelson /TiVo