Pauline Anna Strom

Career Strom moved to the Bay Area in the early 1970s and embarked on a career in music by acquiring synthesizers and building compositions with a Tascam four-track recorder. She regularly worked with a Yamaha DX7, Prophet-10, two CS1x keyboards and an E-mu Emulator. She taught herself to compose intuitively. She explained, "I learned as I go. And I learned through repetition—I'd try something and see what I'd get and play with it that way. ... If someone asked me how I did it, I honestly couldn't say how I did it, I just did it. ... I went into a different space. ... I'd start at six at night and I could go until six in the morning." Strom's range of equipment allowed her flexibility in composition and she used this home work station to create 7 albums.

Strom said that she translated visual ideas into audio using her setup.

Calling herself the Trans-Millenia Consort, Strom mapped an inner world of imagined pasts, possible futures, and alternate realities. She sought to act as a "consort" for her audience, "spiriting listeners through epochs described by her evocative musical passages," according to the label, RVNG Intl.

The ability to tap into, map, and translate an "inner world"

Leaving music industry and re-releases Due to financial constraints, Strom sold all her equipment, stopped making music, and focused on building a spiritual healing practice. After a silent period musically, Trans-Millenia Music, compiled from three albums and four cassette tapes recorded from 1982 through 1988, was released by RVNG Intl. in November 2017. RVNG Intl. describes the album as "a collection of transportive synthesizer music providing listeners a vessel to break beyond temporal limits into a world of pulsing, mercurial tonalities and charged, embryonic waveforms."

The re-circulation of Pauline's music in 2017 was well received by the music press and online magazines. The Wire magazine listed Trans-Millenia Music as No. 2 for Archive Releases of the Year in their 2017 end-of-year list.

Echoes, Spaces, Lines, a box set containing Trans-Millenia Consort, Plot Zero, Spectre, and the previously unreleased album Oceans of Tears, was released in 2023.

Pauline was a Reiki master, spiritual counselor, and healer. She lived in San Francisco with her pet iguana, Little Soulstice,

Death Strom died on December 13, 2020, at her home in San Francisco. She was 74. A cause of death was not revealed.

Discography Studio albums Trans-Millenia Consort (vinyl/cassette; Ether Ship Records, 1982) Plot Zero (vinyl/cassette; Trans-Millenia Consort Recordings, 1983) Spectre (vinyl; Trans-Millenia Consort Recordings, 1984) The Moorish Project (cassette; Trans-Millenia Consort Recordings, 1988) Japanese Impressions (cassette; Trans-Millenia Consort Recordings, 1988) Aquatic Realms (cassette; Trans-Millenia Consort Recordings, 1988) Mach 3.04 (cassette; Trans-Millenia Consort Recordings, 1988) Angel Tears in Sunlight (vinyl/CD, RVNG Intl., 2021)

Compilation albums Trans-Millenia Music (vinyl/CD; RVNG Intl., 2017)

Box sets Echoes, Spaces, Lines (vinyl/CD; RVNG Intl., 2023)