Solsten
Recording Artist / Electronic Music / Montréal, QC
“Dance Music for Our Post-Truth Reality”
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About
Solsten
Artist Biography
Solsten grew up in three very different parts of Canada. Born in Saskatchewan, raised in Victoria, BC, and living in Montréal for over a decade now, those landscapes are all somewhere in his music. As a teenager he was a regular listener of CBC’s Brave New Waves, and a summer spent in Japan in his early twenties deepened a conviction that music could be a total environment rather than just a backdrop. He spent years pursuing cooking, abstract painting, photography, and filmmaking alongside music production, with genuine seriousness in all of them.
The death of his mother in 2012 pushed music to the centre. He immersed himself in the dubstep and techno scenes of Vancouver and Montréal, and in 2016 traveled to Los Angeles to record his debut material. The 1960 EP arrived in late 2017.
In 2022 his father disappeared and was eventually confirmed dead. Ghosts of Uranium City (2024), recorded at Eightfold Studios, carries that weight. Anchored in the industrial dub techno of Basic Channel, Sandwell District, Rrose, and Silent Servant, it earned critical attention for how directly it reckoned with grief without surrendering its physicality.
Cold Concrete, Warm Waters (March 2025) is where the work begins to open up. Still rooted in techno and dub, the album is more candid and more sensual than anything he had released before, and it makes clear his intent to move beyond what the genre usually expects. He is currently completing his fourth album and lives in Montréal with his two cats, Elizabeth and Henry (Jennings).
