Carl Stone - Arthur Fischl Conducts the Music of Carl Stone (Arr. Fischl) (2026)

Freaks of all stripes are in for a wild treat with Carl Stone’s ludic jazz-to-hyperpop hijinx in duo with “famed composer and arranger” Arthur Fischl, who may or may not be his secret AI twin. Either way, it’s borderline genius/madness in an inventive vein comparable to early PC Music act Dux Content (Danny L Harle & AG Cook), Vicki Bennett, soundtracks to Matthew Barney’s art films, Mr. Bungle, or Two Shell scoring a turbo folk ceilidh.

“One of Carl Stone’s long-term fixations has been the collision of unrelated musical genres, forcing familiar sounds through cultural filters to see what breaks: a Puccini interlude rising to swallow the space behind a mainstream pop vocal; a Mussorgsky theme passed around like a communal meal shared by minimalists, Irish musicians, and a fractured symphony orchestra.

Stone had long wondered what would happen if he handed his music over to a skilled orchestrator or arranger. For *Arthur Fischl Conducts the Music of Carl Stone*, he stepped outside his laptop comfort zone and collaborated with famed orchestrator and arranger Arthur Fischl. Through prompting, revision, and back-and-forth guidance, they built arrangements that quote the originals while stacking new meanings on top. They layered styles sequentially and vertically, sometimes subtly and sometimes to the point of absurdity.

Together, they parodied country-western, swing, baroque music, cool jazz, musical theater, and Stone’s own style. In the end, style itself became a parameter knob they could twist, like volume or pitch. Leaving the digital console gave the music a new scale—one that created the absurdity and distance Stone needed to laugh at his own work.”