Effective period / Period of releases: 1999 - 2000

William Linton is a Nashville-based synthesist and pianist who wrote several space ambient albums in 1986 while attending Belmont College. He worked closely with Tony Gerber who went on to have a career in electronic music as an artist and label owner, though Linton opted for a lower profile. After graduating from college he entered the workforce as a software engineer and didn’t return to music for over a decade. With the advent of mp3.com, Linton re-emerged to put out the archival Wayfarer in 1999 and a CD of piano instrumentals in 2001.

William Linton was born in 1962 and grew up in a rural area, just outside Nashville, Tennessee. His grandmother lived next door in an ancient house from the 1800s and had an old piano and pump organ. Linton was fascinated by the organ and recalls playing around with it as a young boy. At the age of nine, Linton took up the trombone and played in the school band and orchestra until 7th grade. But as he entered his teen years, he lost interest and didn’t play again until after high school. A friend of his had shown him an Arp Axxe synthesizer and he was immediately transfixed, just like with his mother’s pump organ, all over again.

Linton started college late, around the age of 20. He went to nearby Belmont college where he studied music theory and composition. He also spent a great deal of time in their electronic music lab which had an Arp 2600 and a Moog III. By then he’d also purchased his own small keyboard, the Moog MG-1, soon to be followed by the more powerful Oberheim OB-8. At school, he met other electronic music fans like Giles Reaves and Tony Gerber who were also learning how to use the complex synths, as well as how to engineer and record them. However, Linton wasn’t ready to commit to a career in music and ultimately got his degree not from Belmont, but from a technical school nearby where he majored in Engineering Technology.

During this period, Linton was deeply influenced by the music on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Stephen Hill’s Hearts of Space radio show. He recorded it every week, discovering a whole new world of music. "Michael Stearns - his album Planetary Unfolding is one of my all-time favorites," Linton said. “There is so much going on there. The more you listen, the more you hear. I was also really into Steve Roach and Iasos. Of course, Tangerine Dream kind of goes without saying. As an early teen, I loved their album White Eagle.”

In 1986, Linton recorded some ethereal music in the vein of what he heard on Hearts of Space and sent a demo to Hill. To his surprise, Hill called him out of the blue one day. "This was before caller ID," Linton said. "I just picked up the phone and a voice said, 'Hello, Is William Linton there? This is Stephen Hill. I'd like to feature your music on my show.' And then I realized I don’t even have an album. So I got one together pretty quickly." Linton self-released his first album Traveler’s Tales and Hill mastered it to digital tape in California. Once his music was played on Hearts of Space, Hill set Linton up with distribution via Lloyd Barde’s Backroads catalog, a mainstay of new age and cosmic sounds at the time. Linton recalls selling about 300 copies on cassette.

Linton followed up Traveler’s Tales in the same year with Cosmic Flight, an epic and cosmic improvisation with Gerber (then known as Anthony Rian) and Mason Stevens, a guitarist who he knew through private lessons in song composition.

After graduating from college, Linton didn't record again for over a decade. He kept a small studio where he would tinker and play occasionally, but he was more focused on his career in corporate technology, troubleshooting, and implementing computer software. By the late '90s, Gerber was having success selling his music on mp3.com, a site that allowed artists to sell digital downloads directly to fans. Gerber set up a label called Room for Space and re-issued Linton’s old cassettes for the site. By then, Linton had a decade's worth of material, and he culled the best tracks for a new album in 1999 called Wayfarer. According to Linton, he made more money from mp3.com than he did in the ‘80s selling cassettes.

Linton released an album of piano instrumentals in 2001 but hasn’t released anything since. He currently lives in Nashville.