John Edmonds' music comes from wild places, extreme environments, mysteries of mind, and wrinkles in time.

“Subzerosonic” is progressive deep-space ice groove for Chapman Stick and synthesizer inspired by life in Alaska. Mostly improvised, it mixes elements of jazz, world, ambient, and fusion.

While the album’s rhythmic complexity is subtle, it is a feast of odd time. Meters include 25/16, 15/8, 17/16, 13/8, and 35/16, with subdivisions and longer cycles superimposed over and between the underlying measures. Some combinations involve two or three meters at once and are almost too complex to count.

“Subzerosonic” was recorded in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska. Six tracks are tributes to sites of the world’s lowest recorded temperatures, and the seventh visits a mountain on Mars that reaches -200 degrees F (-130 C) nightly.

“When Schemes Come True” is an instrumental jazz-rock intrigue for guitars and electronic orchestra. If it were a book, it would be a spy novel with nefarious characters weaving through top-secret plots in beautiful foreign lands. Musical themes appear and reappear in variations both obvious and clandestine, sometimes backward or upside down, in deep disguise or inside out. Except for the guitar solos, this work is highly composed and calculated.

The fourth track, “Ghost of John,” is a haunting interpretation of a traditional children’s Halloween round. It was recorded live to DAT in winter 1994. The rest of the album was recorded in 1991 and sold on cassette. The current collection was digitally mastered and re-released on CD in 2003.

The fourth track, “Ghost of John,” is a haunting interpretation of a traditional children’s Halloween round. It was recorded live to DAT in winter 1994. The rest of the album was recorded in 1991 and sold on cassette. The current collection was digitally mastered and re-released on CD in 2003.

Edmonds graduated from the Grove School of Music in Southern California in the 1980s with certificates in guitar and composition. With a BA in music, he has worked as a teacher and an arranger-orchestrator. He produced the earliest demos for American guitarist Buckethead in the early 1990s. In 1997, he moved north, living and recording in the mountains of Alaska. He later retired to the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, where he has a home and studio 9,000 feet (2,750 meters) above sea level.