Where the original was harmonious, the re-reading opens sounding as if its frequencies have been badly, perhaps even malevolently disturbed.
The sublime raga Vernal Crossing, Robin Storey’s third release as Rapoon, is a seminal album in its simultaneous ground-breaking and re-thinking of quasi-industrial ambient, its soft but persistent percussion, spectral female vocals and colored drones replacing anvils, pistons and grease with tablas, bamboo and tiger balsam. To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Storey has revisited the album, creating a companion commentary with entirely new titles (that taken together read like a poem), which Zoharum has packaged together in a glossy, burgundy double set.
Vernal Crossing (2013 Remake) is a radical retrofit, an entirely new album, really, and a very good one. Where the original was harmonious, the re-reading opens sounding as if its frequencies have been badly, perhaps even malevolently disturbed. With strangled vocal, a digital cicada edge on its sustained, thin string drones and fidgety, drum-machine rhythms, it takes a while to compose a face bearing a family resemblance to the original, but does so by the time the grainy deterioration of “The Waters Edge” slips into “Where Stars Reflect.” Still, twenty years have definitely left their mark. There is global confusion rather than planetary harmony in the multi-ethnic carnivality of “In Marked Walls,” and two, lengthy closing pieces are completely drained of all color. Ten and twenty minutes long, respectively, both are higher-pitched and lacey, the second bleating the false notes of a tube orbiting through space. Which doesn’t mean Storey has thrown acid in the face of a masterpiece, just seasoned verdancy into verdigris.
Vernal Crossing is available on Zoharum. [Release page]
