Pas Musique and Rapoon – Composited Reality

Zoharum

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.

The title never seemed so apt, as Pepper and Storey bring their own particular version of reality to life in one long-form track that switches moods with the tides, seeds burning and flickering in dubwise refractions that hold attention like there is in fact no exterior world; or has the interior successfully been actualised, made corporeal in the temporary autonomous zone that only music can embody?

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.

Dubby wafts of over-stretched echoes roil and reverberate, taking a motif, a sitar twang or a motorised moment, shifting its paradigms into that unique place where digital duppies live. The trails and turns recurse and remake themselves into new spectral formations that evoke temporal distortion, spinning up wildly into inhuman ripples of FX scrapes, stretched-out tones and drones. Kalimba threnodies drag time, willingly or otherwise, beyond its habitual forms and into that area of the unheimlich where electric divination rests awhile in thought.

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.

Composited Reality is one of those collaborations that takes each participant’s contributions and makes them something more, something extra, extra-sensory even. Whether they swapped files over the internet or sat next to each other in a studio is unimportant, irrelevant to the ultimate collective sense of mutual direction that the pair engender, their duality become multiple and single, at once indistinguishable and unified.

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-