Michael Stasis is a songwriter and artist living in Los Angeles. Since the age of thirteen, he has written and recorded music in tiny homemade studios. As a child, Michael and his father would make toys and go for heady night walks through the rolling hills and lonely mansions of Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. With its own American folklore of wealthy industrialists, witches and dog-people, Michael's youth danced with an oil-to-water hatred of homework and beige pragmatism. Convinced that imagination and faith in the unknown are keys to the good life, he left home to study art at Cooper Union in Manhattan. For his first release on Arbutus, RIP III is the third in a "greatest hits" series. Largely self-recorded, his restless output (over two hundred songs) has jumped sonically and stylistically, leaving some listeners to wonder if it's the same artist at all. Stasis calls it "playlist mentality", a fractured approach borrowed from current listening patterns and dwindling attention spans. This intuitive tactic, he hopes, will keep people interested, rather than lamenting a bygone era of classic anything. For Fans of Bill Callahan, Ariel Pink, Magnetic Fields.