INTRODUCING: Greg Stasiw

Experimental musician, visual artist, and writer Greg Stasiw presents his debut album Guesswork, a radiant and immersive collection of free-flowing electronic compositions shaped over a four-year period. Drawing from ambient music, minimalism, intricate sound design, and Japanese environmental music, Guesswork contemplates the relationship between sound and space with remarkable clarity and restraint.

Released on 2nd February 2026 via Hidden Harmony Recordings (Vinyl & Digital), the album evokes wide-eyed wonder, tranquility, gentle melancholy, and discovery. RIYL Hiroshi Yoshimura, Harold Budd, Norman McLaren, Pauline Anna Strom, Guesswork unfolds like a sequence of semi-imagined environments—verdant, alien, playful, sacred—inviting deep listening and psychoacoustic comfort.

Originally inspired by a proposed collaboration with visual artist Philippe Shewchenko, the project evolved into an idiosyncratic soundworld where abstraction and representation intertwine. With Guesswork, Stasiw embraces semi-improvisation, trial and error, and what he describes as “enthusiastic caution,” allowing curiosity to guide form, emotion, and spatial perception.

1. Guesswork blends ambient, minimalism, and intricate sound design to create immersive sonic environments. What inspired you to explore this intersection of sound and space?

The exploration is less of a mission and more of a natural product of my individual musical brain. For me, music connects with navigation and proprioception. The perception of sound events over time creates the feeling of traversing a semi-visual map in my mind. I claim a little innate synesthesia, or some crossed wires. So, my composition process naturally feels a bit like landscape exploration or diorama-making.

I also have influences from environmental and ambient music, styles where artists often engage space directly. I’ve never composed for an airport or an art gallery, but I appreciate the essential affinities between sound and space. Energy, matter, voids… It’s tricky to articulate what separates a recording from a building or a sculpture. I want to keep thinking about these topics, and I’m not sure I have easy answers yet.

2. The album was partially inspired by a proposed collaboration with visual artist Philippe Shewchenko. How did his visuals shape the music, even though the original project didn’t come together?

His art features nature, pattern, liminality, and funny little(?) entities. Sometimes you wonder if you’re looking at something botanical or something cosmic. So, I started out trying to soundtrack environments that were both earthy and otherworldly. I caught myself in “serious mode” during a lot of this album production, but listening back, there’s a pinch of weird humor present as well, which reveals more of our shared impulses.

I also think that both his art and the album juggle abstraction and representation. If I recall correctly, we once discussed bringing nature into art not through traditional representation but by learning to speak tree, or rock, or whatever. I’m energized by a visual approach that respects nature’s material language and rulesets but avoids standard taxonomy and depiction.

3. Tracks like “Humidity” and “Field” evoke distinct, otherworldly spaces. How do you approach translating imagined or environmental landscapes into sound?

I’d say the sounds are the landscapes themselves, and I seldom have a complete space in mind that I want to illustrate. Any environments unfold in real-time during recording. I might start with a single chosen detail, like wood cracking apart in “Xylem,” but then things evolve in a reactive way. And sometimes in a very abstract way. I mentioned dioramas earlier to evoke arrangement, but I avoid blueprints or literal description.

“Humidity” started with a field recording that became a substrate for free-flowing experimentation and layering. The familiar became a bit alien and an unfolding web of interactions shaped the non-biome. “Field” was perhaps slightly top-down. It opens with a semi-choral pad, which felt primordial but also manmade. I then let some very human musical structure guide the geometry. However, as I tinkered, it gave way to an unexpected expanse. I didn’t plan that interplay from the onset, but when I feel a landscape assert itself, I try to lock it in with mixing, timing, timbre, etcetera.

4. You describe your creative process as “guesswork,” experimenting with semi-improvisational compositions over four years. How does this trial-and-error method influence the emotional and spatial qualities of your music?

Any emotional arcs likely stem from the adventure of recording. I can get analytical in retrospect or just before I hit record, but the actual sound mapping involves exploration of material reality by a lone human being. That is to say, I’ve got a lamp and toolkit, but it’s a bit of a cave dive. This can involve fear, epiphany, and triumph. I think it also allows for peace and joy when things open up and soften.

Spatially, the shapes of the musical environments remain inextricable from the questions that reveal them. If I feel sonically compressed and seek contrast, I illuminate expanse. If I feel expansive and want to stay that way, I let open space develop. My attempts at musical interest leaves a trail of impressions. I can then enhance these with arrangement and processing. I avoid scripting and would rather strengthen spatial qualities that result from unplanned musical encounters.

5. As both a visual artist and musician, how do your experiences in other mediums—like animation, illustration, and anthropology—inform the textures, rhythms, and atmospheres of Guesswork?

In animation, I learned to obsess over timing. A focus on emotional beats, pauses, and micro-adjustments carries over to my music production. I also embraced efficient foley work. Trying to get the most out of a limited number of audio files made me a frugal timbre selector. I also learned the hidden richness and ambiguity of basic sounds. A hand clap in a new context can be understood as anything but a hand clap. There’s great potential energy in the simplest materials, and I want to respect that.

In illustration, I have typically embraced a pared-down look. My love of negative space can be found in the atmospheres of Guesswork. My visual tastes have become more abstract, but a creepy-cute sensibility from my illustration heyday may have leaked into the album as well. My most recent ink experiments might relate to some of the less machined textures.

Lastly, it’s interesting to discuss anthropology here. Cultural anthropology and archaeology remind me that there’s no singular way to do human life. Maybe that encouraged me to step outside of established forms. Analyzing ritual activity might have also affected my palette and purpose.