STAVO CRAFT

    Stavo Craft is a conceptual artist (electronic music and illustrated stories) who studies planetary phenomenon from his homemade space 'craft' … a spacecraft more composed of innerspace than outerspace, but where Alien Beings nevertheless reside. Not little green men, but the aliens we, on Earth, have become to our own natural state.

    Having merged so much with our technologies, and the stories we have told ourselves through history, we are now a self-creation culturally that is in part cyborg, inseparable from the tools we live through. As a space traveling diarist, Craft mines the depths for mirrors of our true and false selves, and the ideas about ourselves we hold as both illusion and fact.

    A strange child from the start, Stavo would walk away from his home and into the woods, outstretching his arms to "call the aliens" hoping that they would see the purity of his oddity-oriented spirit and engage him in an interplanetary dialogue.

Craft doesn't recall ever getting the visitation from the alien ship he had wished for, but he does recall his first encounter with another form of unidentified being; a real life unicorn…it entered his room one night like an invisible gust of wind, and it was this mysterious and glistening magical creature that let him know he had a special mission in life—to create fantasies more real than the mundane structures of daily life on an otherwise warped planet.

Meanwhile, another fantasy come-to-life was brewing within the family hearth. Fate had seen to it that Craft's mother was the person ultimately responsible for giving form to the mythology of the rock group KISS from 1972-1980 in the heyday of their breakthrough into the cultural landscape of rock fame. She wrote under the name of "Bob Steele" as the voice of the KISS Army Fan newsletters, and was the writer of all the promotional stories for radio, TV, and concert programs of each band member's archetypal identity: Gene the demon, Paul the 'Starchild' lover, Space Ace, and Peter the Cat. Craft saw first-hand how the mythology of a band could enter the bloodstream of the world, and that "larger than life" approach to performing reality that KISS employed so successfully. It all planted a seed.

    But rather than wanting to appeal to screaming 8-12 year-olds as KISS had, Craft followed the calling of the Invisible World proposed by his muse. Determined as an artist to fly under the radar while developing his craft, Stavo worked like a unicorn; unseen and as he likes to say, "Internationally Unknown" – an unusual desire for placing art before notoriety in today's cult of the attention seeker. "But I was world famous in Williamsburg Brooklyn, and that was kind of like my unicorn's forest," he says. "But I was always writing and developing the particulars of my art and finding its best expression."

    Indeed, being a key player in the development of the now-famous abandoned warehouse artist community in Williamsburg Brooklyn beginning back in 1995, some of the tracks on the Disques de Lapin release of Stavo Craft's "BE OTHER" retrospective CD go back that far and beyond, and yet others are as recent as 2008. The consistency of a persona on a mission for a new and greater world is indelibly etched in these songs.

    While this is his first non-self-release, the works of Stavo Mustang Craft have been manifested in video, illustration, books, and his eight homemade concept albums of original music. The "Other By Other" feature in the DVD experience also shows how artists learned of Craft's creations and used those soundtracks to spark new creative works, shared with audiences around the globe. Even Craft's unique take on the Unicorn mythology is well-chronicled through the pages of his illustrated novelette "The Future Room" which is shared free of charge on the artist's website.

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