Pauline Anna Strom

Pauline Anna Strom is an American electronic music composer and synthesist. She was born in Kentucky but moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s where she began collecting synthesisers and recording compositions using a Tascam four-track recorder. Having been born blind, Strom’s approach to synthesiser programming was intuitive and she had a versatile range of what were at that time cutting-edge machines that allowed her creative flexibility. Between 1982–1988, she recorded seven albums under the alias Trans-Millennia Consort, which explore cosmic themes of the deep past, the present and the future, and conjure vivid images of an alternate reality.

Strom had to sell her synthesisers because of financial difficulty in the late 1980s so she retired from music-making and instead nurtured her interests in spirituality by becoming a Reiki master and opening her own healing clinic. In 2017, RVNG Intl. released a compilation of some of her 1980s work to critical acclaim and Strom is now recognised as a synthesiser pioneer by a new generation of fans.