Dickson & Familiar

Orchestral Ambient music with clarinet & synths

Glenn Dickson, cutting edge klezmer clarinetist, and Bob Familiar, electronic musician with a history in classic Boston rock bands, have combined to create a lush orchestral sound through layering of the clarinet and synths, yet is human and intimate in its presence.

Glenn has adopted looping techniques and digital manipulations of his acoustic clarinet sound, while Bob utilizes the Osmose keyboard, which extends the intuitive expressiveness of the traditional synthesizer through multi-dimensional sensing for every key, with  drifting loop stations, and state of the art sound processors. 

Their "compositional ambient" style encompasses soaring melodies, awesome textural layerings and detailed interplay between the instruments. They borrow from the best of the ambient world with a classical sensitivity and melodic development that sets them apart from much ambient and electronic music.  Their most recent album "The Wild Stream of Being" came out December, 2025, and their first album, "All the Light of Our Sphere" came out in May,2025.

Dickson & Familiar's new project is a live score for the oldest known animated feature, "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" (1926), a magical and beautiful film by German artist/producer Lotte Reiniger.  This is the centennial of its release and a great time to feature this seminal work.  They have recently premiered it in Cambridge, MA and are scheduled to perform it at Epsilon Spires, Brattleboro, VT. 

PRESS / REVIEWS

“ ...what Glenn Dickson and his accomplice Bob Familiar offer isn’t just music in any conventional sense. It’s closer to poetry, cerebral, unhurried, insistent. A soundscape to be read, not simply heard.” - Thierry De Clemensat

— Paris Move

“ both experimental and drop-dead gorgeous — two characteristics that all-too-rarely coincide.” - Rick Anderson

— CD Hotlist

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