ABOUT

Charlie Foltz is a Asheville transplant and media composer who has released music under the monikers Sunset Exotic and FRENCHGIRLS since 2005. The Californian’s tendency to test musical boundaries is rooted in the sheer variety of genres that have comprised his collective work. Looking back on Charlie’s output, it may be difficult to find commonalities between his love of death metal, psychedelic rock, new wave, and house music. He, however, sees this unique metamorphosis as a natural progression. 

Charlie has been composing for advertising and television since 2016 and has landed music in campaigns for Nike, Samsung, Google, Porsche, and dozens of other major brands. His ability to float between genres and blur genre lines have been the biggest defining characteristics in his professional media-composing career. In 2019, Charlie’s minute-long remix of Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4 was placed in an ad for the US Army and resonated with audiences so well that a full-length version was commissioned by Warner Records and was released under the label in July 2020.

Since the 2017 release of his Odyssey EP, through the moniker Sunset Exotic, Charlie has focused on creating synthetic music that feels both human and organic. His obsession with the tonal complexities of randomization and variability recently prompted a love affair with modular synthesis and a desire to further explore how synthesis can interact with the human voice. In his upcoming album Colony, Foltz explores this newfound love with hopes of expressing feelings of self realization and a commitment to "craft", in its broadest definitions. The album tries to make sense of the chaos that made up the majority of his twenties and hopes to describe the liberation in one's self discovery and self acceptance. Colony marks Foltz's first release under his own name and hopes to be an avenue for him to release his more Ambient/Experimental works.