The dusty kinetics of Hotel Bravo‘s opener “Hotel Paris” slope into your ear in skipping recoils, navigated by quiet words and whispered replies, periodically broken by a taut Japanese-flavoured melodic and pattering synth-washes.

An ambient lamp light falls into the fragmented flux of “When The Chimes End” its stuttering percussives taking the dusty grooves of the first track to milk a purposeful sparseness that bleeds throughout this release from Rapoon, something that romances the crumbling grey and beige of the derelict hotel furnishing the cover.

This is something that the expanding vistas of “In Lights Of Gold” seem a little overrun by, a trickle of golden pins glinting too loudly over the swirling hues below. A slight irksome point the debris-filled hiss of the album’s ending attentively adjusts into lonely latitudes of chord lost in oozy exhales of static and subtle whisper.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-

Blending field recordings from places as far afield as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Brooklyn and Indonesia, Robert L Pepper and Robin Storey (also known as Pas Musique and Rapoon respectively) brought Composited Reality to the world on cassette and USB stick in 2018. Now Zoharum have issued a CD edition, and it shimmers with a haze of imaginary and real landscapes made artificial flesh, its coherence constructed into a miasma of hallucinatory soundscapes that glow with the acoustic aura of what John Hassell termed the fourth world.

This vibratory travelogue that exists in no geographical zone known on Earth in this particular form, save for on the spinning bits and bytes engraved in ridges on a compact disc, or still more dematerialised yet on hard drives and smart media, on flash devices or streamed online. And it’s this disjunction between what is “real” that Composited Reality addresses, while also providing a place to zone out beyond the veil of human tears that passes for quotidian existence.

These electronic figments from the id tumble and twitch like an echoing formant, evincing a kind of descent from the Krell instrumentality from Forbidden Planet, their ghostly remnants turning on multiple axes as if there was no gravity, no longer any earthbound source to their acoustic selves. Sounds become twisted and repopulated in nascent shapes that have leapt unbound from their specific origins, turn themselves into something other, something familiar yet distinct. This is a place where machine elves lurk, chattering and whooping, sending forth far-distant choruses or scuttling and spinning virtual bells for their own entertainment, and perhaps not even the listener’s; they simply may not care.

Fifty-odd minutes might be the length of the average binge-watched TV episode to some, but in the electronic hands and arms of Pas Musique and Rapoon it can seem like a lifetime, an ayahuasca-condensed trip (in every sense) from A to B via Z and sigma, aleph and omega, one and zero. The sum can transcend is particulate matter, whether they meander and randomise or push right up facewards and direct; this round the world excursion may have been brought to life by the letters D, M and T, and the avant-garde says “hello world” too.

-Linus Tossio-

Hallucinatory and suffused with a sense of being largely abstracted from place and time as it is generally understood to exist, Rapoon‘s My Life as A Ghost seethes with fluctuations in the space-time continuum. Drenched in reverberant FX, the album is in part a product of its era (it was originally released in 2004) whilst often being curiously adrift on notions of musical genre. Yes, it’s largely very ambient; for sure, there are funky drummings looped into occasionally bizarre dimensions; but it’s at once music rooted in the past — often a very long way back to a pre-notation, let alone pre-recording age) — and possessed of a forward-thinking shimmer that eludes precise location, geographically or in genre.

As with many recent Zoharum re-releases of the Rapoon back catalogue, there’s a full CD’s worth of bonus material, remixed from the My Life As A Ghost sessions, alongside some new music too. Some of this is familiar from the original album — “Vertical Moonlight” and “What’s Been Happening?” are extended and beefed-up stomps through “Tell Charlene” territory and “Terminus Gris” is a four-track tape whirl through moments from the first disc. Others, such as “Not Knowing”, have a crisp, modern feel to them that could of course be entirely illusory. “In Marakkesh” is a broad-spectrum virtual travelogue though a Morocco rendered larger than life in ethnodelic electronic intensity, suffused with Storey’s characteristically deft ability to craft soundscapes that never dishonour the cultures from which they draw so lovingly.

Rhiz, from 2002, is a yet more energetic album, fizzling with harsh beats, smooth grooves and pumping floorfillers. There’s a subcontinental feel to many of the samples Storey folds into the mix and a shuffling slyness to the way that orchestral snippets will loom to the foreground briefly before slipping below the surface on “Ho Gaya Can”, for instance. Rhiz demonstrates that while this is definitely dance music, it’s not going to be an easy or familiar ride, save perhaps for those familiar with the likes of Coil or Psychic TV at their most electronic and club-friendly.

-Antron S Meister-

Drenched in reverb and flecked with voices from the Eastern aether, Fall of Drums is Robin Storey‘s third or so new Rapoon album in the space of a year, but the first on Zoharum since To West and Blue in 2013 and various re-issues which the label has put out recently. Over four lengthy, stretched-out tracks, the album sets about creating a hallucinogenic landscape of languorous percussion and the sort of electronic haze which seems almost thick with fragrant smoke and coated with a resinous fug of ages.

Instead, echoed dub reverberations are everywhere, ghostly trails and complex layers which roll and occasionally roil with all the befuddled and baffling segues of a deep, disorienting desert dream which never reveals its obvious meanings. Too queasily involving to ever become so ambient as to disappear into the background, Fall of Drums would prefer to sway and sidle closer to the parts of the listener’s brain which nag and gnaw at the eternal and embrace the juxtaposition of the familiar and the mysterious. Once established, they glide inside while layered string ripples, sampled percussion, attenuated terpsichorean chants and motion-pressing djinni of the machines make their own distractions, there to set up home for the duration, as if their presence had always been thus and so.

Machine River could perhaps be described at a pinch as musique concrète in dub, as Storey manipulates and arranges the various sounds supplied by Shaun Sandor (AKA Promute) alongside his own into a psychedelic vision which possesses some affinities with Fall of Drums – especially when heard straight afterwards. On closer listening it’s apparent that the spaces occupied by Promute’s electro-acoustics lend the album a different mood, and when the various sitar, piano and guitars make their deracinated presence felt, the relative clarity here is like stepping into a brighter space, though one still held in thrall to the meditative and haunted by the eerily spectral.

-Linus Tossio-

To West And Blue is the 50th (!!!) album by Rapoon, and it trades in dark ambient’s typical deep space cosmic horror for mudflats and marshlands, making for a superb movie of the mind. The album was inspired, in part, by a part of Britain where Robin Storey, here known as Rapoon and also co-founder of influential industrial terrorists :zoviet-france:, grew up. Here’s how he describes it:

These pieces are about the area grew up in in the UK. A peninsula of land which stuck out into the Solway Firth. Surrounded by the sea when the tide was in and surrounded by endless mudflats when the tide was out. When the water covered the ground the line between the sea and the sky was almost non-existent. A diaphanous boundary. The sea came in from the West where the huge skies hung without end in a vault of blue.

The landscape evoked on “To West And Back” is not maleficent, per se, as much as irrational. Deep electronic drones, swarthy in cavernous echo, sounding like the bottom of the ocean, create a dense and shifting wall, where tones rise and fall like dreams or visions. It’s very much a journey, a place to walk around and explore and get lost in. It starts off pretty haunting and lonely, but ends with the sun burning through the clouds, ending on an up note.

One of the defining factors that makes or breaks experimental music, whether making it or listening to it, is a sense of narrative, a sense of something going on. Otherwise it becomes such meaningless line-noise, a series of abstract tones, bouncing off the ear. When listening to ambient, dark ambient, drone or noise album, you can’t help but wonder: what is the producer getting at? When music is neither tethered to language or even traditional musical systems, even the idea of “what is good” goes out the window.

That’s part of why it’s important for producers to maintain quality control. And why it’s important to the listeners to not become jaded. Because there is bounty to be rewarded, from listening to imaginative, subjective music. It sets yr imagination alight, lets you draw yr own conclusions, have yr own fantasies, inspires yr own creativity. It inspires the way that we look at the world, and at Art, and what is possible.

Listening to music is a “hot”, imaginative medium, that plays out between yr ears even more so than literature, which is still tied to “words” and the “alphabet”. Since Futurism, and musique concrète, ever since we got tape recorders, basically, every sound on earth (not to mention from the archives) is at our disposal, and the rules of how to sculpt sounds into music are still being written. It’s kind of like the Wild West; anything goes. Which leaves it up to the producers, and the listeners, to decide for themselves what they are attempting, and whether it succeeds or fails.

So it’s important to grasp the music you are listening to, to have a way to latch on and relate to it. To make it memorable. On the part of the artist, that means being brutally, abundantly clear what they are trying to say, how they are going to say it, and why. A lot of the abstract, droney music that you’ll hear, especially being made contemporarily, is being made in the computer and is built out of loops. A lot of the ‘why’ is merely screwing around, un-patterned and not saying anything other than, “look, this is me, screwing around with my machines.” Which is all well and good, and we all love messing about with machines; but the question remains: what, then, to do with it? How to go from abstraction to a moving piece of sound art/musical genius? Especially when the pallet is unlimited?

That’s part of why it’s important to listen to people who have been making electronic music for a long time. To hear how they go about it, and what they are attempting. That’s not to argue that just because something’s ‘old’ or ‘classic’ means it’s necessarily good, although the recent revival of interest in archival and re-issues of vintage electronic and industrial music certainly indicates that people’s ears are grasping for it. But people like Robin Storey have been making music for a long time – clearly he is committed, and one would suspect has probably learned a thing or two along the way.

This is truly important, this pushing forward, this striving towards mastery of painting with sounds and building new instruments, new song structures. Otherwise, we will recede into brash and blaring rehashing of pop formula, with each boy band screaming over the last. But it’s also important the electronic producer holds him/herself accountable, learns the ropes, considers what has come before, and who their intended audience is.

I’m glad to see Rapoon expanding the scope of dark, mysterious and immersive ambient music – which trips into horror tropes far too often, and quickly slides off the ear with recognition. I’m also glad to see him still pushing limits, expanding the canon, making masterful music. This is truly exceptional sound sculpture, make no bones about it, that will conjure all manner of subjective worlds in yr imagination, and inspire you to make yr own.

-J Simpson-

The desert is a place of sunlight and shadows; a place of bedouins and fertile deltas; lazy, muddy rivers and ancient tales. Time stands still beneath the flaming orb of the relentless sun. You feel the need to whisper, despite the whining wind. It is a place of fakir and genie, supplication and purification. This is the realm of Vernal Crossing Revisited.

To mark the 20th anniversary of Vernal Crossing, Storey and Zoharum Records have offered up a special treat: a deluxe double CD, featuring a remaster of the original, and a 2013 reworking of the material by Rapoon. Vernal Crossing Revisited offers a rare opportunity to both re-assess the state of underground electronic music in ’93, and a chance to clearly observe the present.

It reminds us of the exotic, worldly tendencies of the early-’90s, to sample anything and everything, before the self-consciousness of cultural appropriation had quite set its hooks in. With the recent success of the beat excursions of Vatican Shadow, and a newfound appreciation of the works of Bryn Jones, the time is right to unearth this time capsule. By contrast, the modern take is sharp where the original was impressionistic, intricate and varied where the first was hypnotic and lulling. The beats are impressive, and the drum machines sound great; so you can’t really say one is superior to the other, they just have different moods or flavors. I could imagine 1993’s version playing in cafés, bookshops, or yoga classes, while the newer version would work on more introverted, visionary dancefloors.

Vernal Crossing Revisited works quite well as a whole, spanning over two hours. I’ve had a number of reflective sessions listening to this, being transported to somewhere warmer, as the gloom of the Pacific Northwest sets in. This is excellent ambient music, great for reading or for walking around, lost in thought. Fall under the spell, feel the mantric beat, start to sway. Bring something otherworldly into your life, and discover the vast continent of Rapoon.

-J Simpson-

As might be expected, Robin Storey‘s take on drum & bass is somewhat denser than the usual clatter of hyperspeed breaks, rolllllls and rewinds. Instead, the two discs of Cold War Drum ‘n’ Bass are crammed with unfurling meditations in rhythm and texture, linked by the ideas of paranoia and mutually assured destruction of a childhood surrounded by the hardware and attitudes of unfought warfare. Thus the album is suitably tense, with beats trundling in production lines of menace, liberally sprinkled with restrained crackles, undead vocal trills, ghosted reflections of uniformed dances and windswept airbase hoedowns past and curled-up echoes which step slowly at their own shuffling pace.

Two discs of heavyweight reflections on an era that’s not so far away as it seems in the 21st Century’s New World Ordure could become dreary and depressing, but given time to breathe and expand, this album can soon become enveloping. Rapoon is one of those names which has associations all its own; hovering disquiet, eerie voiceless choral ambience, discomforting electronic expressionism. There is a preference for avoidance of quick release of tension in the breakbeats and bass, which take their own time to the drones and concrète percussion rather than in the fire of sampler tricknology demonstrations.

That the low end is visited sparingly, as found on the miasmic “Lunarists In The Jungle” and under the tripping rimshot scatters of “Exactly”, makes for a record where the press of air from bulging speakers is more of a surprise than a rush. Similar dissonances greet the clattery loops of “Fixated” or infect the wheezing break which underpins the creakily awry swelling chords of “Almost, Still”. Like Muslimgauze, Storey dissects the radio æther for his atmospherics and selects suitable percussive sounds with care, except here the culture being dissected is more often closer at hand in space if not time.

Perhaps it’s unfair to mention what Cold War Drum ‘n’ Bass isn’t, but one thing it doesn’t share with most recordings which offer up that generic description is the funk in any great quantity. The grooves here are of an altogether different variety, and are found in the hypnotic roll of a syncopated sampled beat rather than in the danceable realms – there’s way too much circling ambiguity going on for shaking hips to, though “A Desert Wind” does lurch to an echo-drenched hiphop rhythm.

As with The Third Eye Foundation‘s dread psychedelic decadence, there is much more in the rhythms and tones and processed choirs to warp the head than stimulate the body on this album. Shivery and shimmering, and occasionally disquieting too, Cold War… reflects its subject matter rather well in the bursts of motion and tension scattered among the long passages of uncertain loops, distressed vocal harmonies and hesitant, hair-trigger stillness.

-Freq1C-

At first seemingly a strange departure for Robin Storey in his Rapoon guise, The Alien Question starts out as a series of simple sound loops and harmonium chords accompanying the spoken words of alien ambassador Hoh Krll. The increasingly paranoiac ideas which Krll outlines are of course familiar to almost everyone from Western popular culture’s obsession with all things alien and Grey (or from Betelgeuse, allegedly, or maybe in fact Mars). As the album develops, ethnodelic tracks like “Waddi Haj”, “Give Us Dub” and “Never Called NJ12″ emerge in more familiar style, layering North African/Middle Eastern sound and vocal samples into engaging dubs of camel-riding bass and cycling percussion, with little apparent relation to the visitors in question – though the latter brings back the now-familiar outline of international conspiracies to the forefront.

Perhaps Storey is drawing attention to the wealth of fascination to be drawn from so-called exotic cultures outside the sphere of most Euro-American experience, without recourse to intrusions from the extra-terrestrial. While …’s manic and detailed allegations about the arrival and subsequent dominance of the Betelguesians could also be the information being made available for either the puropses of entertainment or warning, it’s also equally possible that there is more interest in the tonal, almost droning, qualities of the voice as it becomes decontextualised by the variety of rhythms and ambiences circling around and below it, becoming in the process another part of the soundscape.

There’s much to support this latter view – the words become increasingly cut up, pasted and rehashed, as with other works which draw on the voice of a charismatic raconteur of cultural marginalia (e.g. Gus van Sant‘s hypnotic rewiring of William Burroughs into The Elvis Of Letters). As the CD develops, orchestral and/or choral fragments take the fore, or layered ambient keyboards with pulsing beats, overwhelming and subduing the text, making a continuous recapitulation and rephrasing of the basic motifs. By the conclusing “I Don’t Expect Anyone…”, everything has become almost operatic, slipping off with a flourish of trailing choral echo. What Do You Suppose? has much to recommend it on many levels, possessed as it is of much that rewards either simple Ambient chilling or the examination of the words of a slightly deranged UFOlogical phenomenon.

-Antron S. Meister-