Some pieces expand like lungs filling with fresh air, others get the wind sucked right out of them. And of course Rapoon also drifts far, far away…
The fourth double volume of Seeds in the Tide, the Zoharum label’s herculean effort to collect and catalogue all non-canonical testamonia to Robin Storey’s storied output under the Rapoon moniker, contains a first disc that is the most cornucopian yet, dominated by pieces plucked from various international compilations from 2005 and 2007 inclusive, including one in tribute to Hungarian composer György Ligeti.
The entire twenty minutes of Seven Pillars of Fire, a braying, Islamo-Druidic ceremonial, is immediately ecumenicized by the Christian chant of “Hosanna” (and, in the interest of fairness and balance, the more demonic “Hosanna 2”). Tracking his career on a close chronology like this, the listener can more readily detect the common fingerprints Storey has left as his art progressed, as “Vertical Drift” and “Plainsong” bear unmistakable traces of “Hosanna.”
Some pieces expand like lungs filling with fresh air, others get the wind sucked right out of them. And of course Rapoon also drifts far, far away, navigating spacely radio interference on “Full Moon Eye” and “The Moment Screams,” followed by the more disorientingly familiar “The Time Before” and the delightfully chilling interstellar vacuum of “Telling.” A salmagundi of sonorousness that wraps up with the campfire guitar ambience of Rapoon’s remix of Xela’s “Gal-Fel.”
The second disc is a second visit to club Rhiz in Vienna, a previously unreleased, forty-five minute Euro-African robot dance in a deconsecrated church, where the ghosts of the evicted saints still squat, joined by deities of other faiths, beating their drums, shaking their rosaries and spangling their sitars while an opera company and a satellite losing orbit disturb a lone pianist.
Seeds in the Tide is available on Zoharum.
