Robert Rich - A Troubled Resting Place
|
ORDER VIA OUR SECURE SERVER
OR CALL 212-580-9200 x10
|
Track Listing
- The Simorgh Sleeps on Velvet Tongues 10:22
- Calling by Stormlight 5:10
- Buoyant on Motionless Deluge 7:51
- Bioelectric Plasma 16:40
- Black Skies 5:19
- Night Sky Replies 20:30
|
- A Troubled Resting Place, a collection of pieces composed for experimental compilations our slowly-getting-famous ROBERT RICH. A seamless fusion of digital and acoustic sound environments, navigating strange domains. A Troubled Resting Place is an arresting document of the recent solo work of experimental electronic composer ROBERT RICH. Collecting previously published tracks from a number of small-run labels on the international scene, the album presents Rich's contemporary vision with stunning clarity, exhibiting the seamless fusion of digital and acoustical environments that has proven central to the composer's more than decade-long span of recorded work.
"The title originally came out as a description of the music," Rich explains. "I was going for this quality of a sort of static slow-burn; music that contained an atmosphere, not dissonant or dark, but a little troubled." Composed during a time of transition in Rich's own life, the album explores the sort of extended, contemplative droning characteristic of his earliest work, but is here fleshed out with organic arrangments of shape, hue, and texture that expand the individual tracks into vast, immersive environments that suggest much to the active listener.
With the material originating on projects for labels like TimeBase, Side Effects, Projekt, and Amplexus, A Troubled Resting Place also offers a probing, more outbound side to Rich's solo guise. "I like compilations because they reach a different audience and they allow me to be more experimental," Rich says. Though reminiscent of his recent solo work with B. LUSTMORD, much of the material was actually completed before their 1995 HOS collaboration, Stalker, and finds Rich foregrounding elements of composition and sound design previously more foundational to his solo work.
Employing instruments in terms of mutational possibility instead of harmonic or melodic ends in themselves, these compositions breathe a foreignness accentuated by their titles ("The Simorgh Sleeps On Velvet Tongues," "Bioelectric Plasma"). As the composer explains, "a lot of the sounds I use come about through a sort of careful mangling." Synths, steel guitar, flutes, and clay pots, but also field recordings, incidental noise, and the internal artifacts of digital processing all become points of origin in a continual process of musical regeneration, an entropic play of texture and tone that invites exploration.
"In my music I aim for a certain beauty," Rich explains, "but a beauty which is informed by a kind of questioning, aspects of doubt. Beauty has to contain shadows, contrast, and element of death. If you're dealing with human experience you have to deal with death."
|
Robert Rich - Fissures
|
ORDER VIA OUR SECURE SERVER
OR CALL 212-580-9200 x10
|
Track Listing
- Turning to Stone 5:27
- A Canopy of Shivers 5:51
- Sirena 9:10
- Mycelia 8:13
- The Divine Radiance of Invertebrates 8:37
- The Road to Wirikuta 18:49
- Tree of the Wind 5:40
|
Acclaimed California electro/acoustic composer Robert Rich joins soundscape constructor ALIO DIE (Stefano Musso) for this eerie, nostalgic set. Haunting phase shifts, metallic chords and vast sonic panoramas guide you into soft alien realms: very gentle and sweet. When seen from an unfamiliar viewpoint, even the most familiar object can seem outlandishly alien. Under extreme magnification, oil on the surface of water is a rioting nebula of color; an eggshell is a new planet of plunging valleys and treacherous cliffs. These perceptual cracks in the everyday insure that nothing can be too familiar, that alien encounters may be as likely found within as "out there."
Fissures, the new collaboration between conceptual electronic composers ALIO DIE (Stefano Musso) and ROBERT RICH, is the soundtrack for such psychic displacements, an acoustic and electronic report on the commerce between nature and technology, and structure and amorphism. The music is a rendezvous of divine symmetries, balancing Alio Die's centerless, synthetic beds of sound and Rich's subtle progressions and instrumental arcana. Characterized by recognizable shifts in color - from the strangely familiar surges of half-remembered novenas, to the rhythmic nodes that reflect nature's ceremony - Fissures marks a unique juncture in two innovative artists' careers.
"Stefano and I met in 1991, when he wrote asking me to contribute to a compilation, and sent me a CD of his debut album, Under An Holy Ritual. I thought it was excellent, and we quickly formed a strong musical rapport," explains Rich.
"Stefano is a sound constructionist who is very sensitive to layers and slow, subtle juxtapositions. His music has a real nostalgia, eerie but not dark. His contribution is sometimes more felt than heard." Musso's role in plotting many of the abstract sounds and drones on Fissures yields some trademark Alio Die moments, such as the haunting phase shifts of "Mycelia" and strange metallic chords of "The Road to Wirikuta."
Bonds to the natural world played a strong part in the conception of Fissures, as Rich explains. The album's vast sonic panoramas have origins in both theoretical and practical considerations: "I know it's a controversial thing to say, but synthesizers aren't capable of certain things. The organic, animal connection you have to the sound making process is lost. That's why Stefano and I approached the recording by employing all the technologies available to us, which includes many acoustic instruments. The sound sources on Fissures are amazingly acoustic, while electronic processing plays a role in setting the atmosphere."
Likewise, the perceptual cracks through which the listener falls are those that derange the common outlook of the world. "In the microcosmic world, when you look at details under a microscope, you get a sense of the vastness of minutiae. The hugeness of the music in Fissures mirrors the hugeness of the single-celled organism when seen acutely, closely."
Fissures also marks a departure from Rich's so-called "dark ambient" work that has populated several memorable compilations over the past three years, and collected on Fathom's A Troubled Resting Place. This too draws back to the album's central motif and title: the cracks in the world that allow passage into realms both alien and imminent. "A 'fissure,' in the shamanic sense," says Rich, "is the point where you dive between worlds. The connection for me in this metaphor is that the journey is undertaken for healing purposes. Stefano and I took a similar journey in our collaboration, and what we brought back is surprisingly gentle, although not without its shadows."
|
Robert Rich - Gaudi
|
ORDER VIA OUR SECURE SERVER
OR CALL 212-580-9200 x10
|
Track Listing
- SAGRADA FAMILIA 4:20
- TRACERY 4:35
- SILHOUETTE 4:01
- THE SPIRAL STEPS 9:49
- HARMONIC CLOUDS 8:47
- AIR 4:38
- SERPENT 6:27
- MINARET 6:26
- MOSAIC 8:17
|
- For ROBERT RICH, the life and work of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi served as a touchstone and inspiration in the lengthy process of creating this music. ÒHis work embodied an awareness of both physical and metaphysical perceptions.ÓFor harmony - that is to say equilibrium - contrast is necessary: light and shade, continuity and discontinuity, convexity and concavity.
-Antonio Gaudi
Even though his work has been internationally acclaimed since the 1930's, I suspect that the name of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi will be new to many of you. A quick glance at the pungent sculptural form of one of the towers of his Church of the Sagrada Familia [reproduced on the inlay card of the CD] should make it clear that Senor Gaudi was an artist of extraordinary sculptural inventiveness.
Less obvious is the profound and rigorous play of scientific structural, geometrical, and mathematical principles hiding under the fascinating surfaces of his work. Rainer Zerbt's 1985 book on Gaudi (from which the cover graphics were derived) is a wonderful introduction, balancing biographical and historical detail with the splendid photographs of Francois Rene Roland.
For ROBERT RICH, the life and work of Gaudi served as a touchstone and inspiration in the lengthy process of creating this music. "While working on the album," he says, "I often used Gaudi as a model. His work embodied an awareness of both physical and metaphysical perceptions, plus the quality of organic growth - very rare in an architect. He combined mathematical underpinnings with the ability to improvise, just as my music has both compositional and improvisatory elements."
For Rich, Gaudi represents a considerable step forward in the direction of integration and balance. The music, he says "deals with the tension and interplay between the physical and the metaphysical, the sensual and the mystical, the material and the abstract. These concerns have been shared by the architects of sacred structures throughout the world. A balanced union of light and shadow, power and subtlety, symmetry and flowing form, can trigger emotions which provide a glimpse of the sublime."
|
Robert Rich - Numena + Geometry
|
ORDER VIA OUR SECURE SERVER
OR CALL 212-580-9200 x10
|
Track Listing
- The Other Side of Twilight 25:04
- Moss Dance 5:45
- Numen 11:51
- The Walled Garden 10:32
- Primes, Part 1 5:20
- Primes, Part 2 6:34
- Interlocking Circles 8:35
- Geometry of the Skies 13:48
- Nesting Ground 6:13
- Geomancy 10:35
- Amrita (Water of Life) 6:39
- Logos 9:57
|
- Together at last, two of ambient ace ROBERT RICH's early classics in one specially priced 2CD set. Revered by electro-acoustic connoisseurs on two continents since their original European editions, painstakingly remastered, these two albums are essential collectibles. About Numena
Having the chance to remix these tapes after almost eight years, I was happy to find that many of the ideas that I began to explore on this album still resonate in me. I am still asking many of the musical questions that I was asking then. But most of all, I am still obsessed by the same love for the living world - that dripping primordial soup. I am still obsessed with the tensions between the symmetric and the organic, the pull between 'shimmer' and 'glurp.'
I am still wandering, distracted and dreaming, lost in the garden of life.
ROBERT RICH 1993
About Geometry
When I began recording Geometry in 1986, I wanted to map certain mathematical relationships directly into musical structures. By maintaining an awareness of the harmonic series and its various expressions into whole numbered ratios, I wanted to fathom the interactions between melody, timbre, rhythm, harmony and tuning. Just Intonation (a tuning system based on whole numbered ratios between frequencies) provided access to many interrelationships among these musical elements. The tunings, which I first explored in Numena, opened my mind to a more unified approach to music, where harmony and timbre merge, where melodies interact with rhythmic cycles, where both chords and poly-rhythms emerge from the same interval relationships. While I am very interested in these relationships, I also wanted to avoid getting bogged down in rigid formulae. I wanted this music to be emotionally compelling, with a core of humanity informing the mathematics.
I found metaphors in the abstract patterns of Islamic design, whose symmetry only serves to accentuate a sense of unity and flowing form. Like the artwork and visual patterns which inspired Geometry, this music should show a balance between structure and freedom. Improvisation plays an important role throughout Geometry (as it does in all of my music). The cyclic rhythms and counterpoint occasionally give way to long explorations in tone color, just as the harmonic tunings give way to the glissandi of a bamboo flute. Beginning at its most abstract and symmetrical, the music slowly shifts to the organic, exploring the same relationships under different guises, hopefully to reflect a union between the guiding principle (Logos) and its manifestation in the world.
|
Robert Rich - Propagation
|
ORDER VIA OUR SECURE SERVER
OR CALL 212-580-9200 x10
|
Track Listing
- animus 9:29
- lifeblood 5:31
- whispers of eden 7:35
- terraced fields 4:24
- LUMINOUS HORIZON 9:45
- SPIRIT CATCHER 9:25
- GUILIN 11:11
|
- According to the composer, Propagation is nothing less than a sonic metaphor for "the miraculous process of living," the spreading of genetic material across the planet in a brilliant, perpetually evolving dance of chemical, biological, and spiritual ecstasy. In the fertile imagination of ROBERT RICH, musical ideas and instruments from around the world mingle, mate, and proliferate in the lush, brackish waves of sound that flow from his well-tuned synthesizers and electronic processors. According to the composer, Propagation is nothing less than a sonic metaphor for "the miraculous process of living," the spreading of genetic material across the planet in a brilliant, perpetually evolving dance of chemical, biological, and spiritual ecstasy.
Appropriately enough, Rich has managed to combine and recombine his vast musical influences to create a few new sonic species of his own. The third Hearts of Space recording from this talented Bay-area multi-instrumentalist adds a number of guest artists to the sensuous yet rigorous cross-cultural stew he's been perfecting for years. Rich himself excels on synths, samplers, slide guitar, percussion, and bamboo flutes, often adding extra spice through his use of exotic tuning systems that reach back to the ancient roots of harmony.
On the opening track, "Animus," Middle Eastern-style flute melodies wrap their breathy, sinuous lines around nebulous veils of synthesized sound and trance-inducing rhythms. Subsequent selections combine Rich's evocative sound imagery with LISA MOSKOW's inviting improvisations on the Indian sarod, Forest Fang's oriental-style violin melodies, and CARTER SCHOLZ's mesmerizing solos on Indonesian gamelan instruments.
The seven resulting pieces illustrate a new level of maturity and complexity in Rich's style. At the same time, Propagation embodies a clarity of vision matched by few artists immersing themselves in the deep and often murky waters of cross-cultural sound explorations.
|
Robert Rich - Rainforest
|
ORDER VIA OUR SECURE SERVER
OR CALL 212-580-9200 x10
|
Track Listing
- Mbira
- Rainforest Suite: Forest Dreams of Bach
- Rainforest Suite: Drumsong (MP3)
- Rainforest Suite: Surface
- Sanctuary
- Temple of Eyes
- The Raining Room
- A Veil of Mist
|
- Rainforest takes you on a polyrhythmic journey into the lush green beauty of the tropical soundspace. A rich, magical ambience and welter of musical influences from southeast Asian gamelan to European classical electronic stretch the mind with a seductive, multi-cultural mix. Rainforest demonstrates the paradox of contemporary electro-acoustic spacemusic projects, with its high-tech approach to some very ancient musical experiences. Digital samplers, computer sequencers, specially tuned synthesizers, conventional acoustic instruments, skin drums, and ambient sound recordings all cohabit a seamless musical and spatial environment.
On the deepest level, ROBERT RICH says the music is about the "yearning for unity... couched in the metaphor of a world of lush green beauty." And you can dance to it! (here and there), while you discover some musical dimensions your parents never told you about.
A portion of the proceeds from sales of this album support the Rainforest Action Network, a non-profit action organization working to save the world's rainforests.
|
Robert Rich - Seven Veils
|
ORDER VIA OUR SECURE SERVER
OR CALL 212-580-9200 x10
|
Track Listing
- Coils 6:03
- Alhambra 10:09
- Talisman of Touch 4:52
- Book of Ecstasy 15:03
- Ibn Sina 8:33
- Dissolve 5:34
- Lapis 10:19
|
- Robert Rich has shown uncanny skill at merging ethnic instruments with electronic enhancements. Seven rhythm-charged compositions with the exotic, sensual ambience of the Middle East. A must-have record for any World/Ambient aficionado. "All music is world music."
Lou Harrison, composer
Seven Veils is artfully woven in layers of musical and metaphysical mysteries, and each time it is heard, more can be uncovered. ROBERT RICH's chosen focus as a composer is sound driven by his intense response to music from Middle and Far Eastern cultures and its many expressions of musical tradition, as well as his "perception of awe for the universe...and how small we are" as bits of living matter in the Petri dish called Earth. The seven-track release reflects Rich's interest in non-Western music and those elements find their way into his work. Particularly affected by North African/Egyptian trance, Persian, North Indian classical, and Indonesian gamelan music, Rich wanted to utilize himself "as a crucible to melt together these influences into something that feels personal." Seven Veils conveys Middle Eastern music's ecstatic element, open to the honest ecstasy within itself, and the resultant communal ritual "magic" that enthralls so many Western listeners.
"Unlike a lot of Western adaptations of non-Western music," adds Rich, "I am not adopting musical vocabularies undigested, but absorbing them and trying to make them into my own voice." Seven Veils can be heard as an expression of an individual searching for truth, and not a pastiche recognized as a bunch of other cultures' music. Rich wanted every note to be honestavoiding obvious references to established ethnic styles. With collaborators DAVID TORN on guitar, HANS CHRISTIAN (who also records with Robert's group, AMOEBA) playing cello, FORREST FANG's gypsy violin, MARK FORRY's Balkan kaval, and the fretless bass of ANDREW MCGOWAN, Rich mixes in his own keyboards, steel guitar, flutes, and the prevalent hand drums, which serve as the heartbeat amid the flow of Seven Veils. Rich's production is pristine, making this an audiophile-quality recording, allowing the listener to differentiate between each acoustic and electronic element, yet feel enveloped by the warm and inviting whole.
Rich is cultivating a seamless blend of body music with Seven Veils. Merging physical, conceptual and mystical elements, the music strives for ecstasy and unity while staying grounded in a lush sensuality. By incorporating, not regurgitating, the vocabularies of non-Western music and traditional truths in his original fashion, Robert Rich's Seven Veils is a balance of body music in which we can find honesty and ecstasy.
|
|
|
