The project has taken shape over three years and that patience and craftsmanship is reflected in the final result. Not a sour note. Housed in a very attractive cover with ghosted title over a cover image that is either disturbing or very amusing.
Robin Rimbaud is so busy that I get exhausted just reading his monthly newsletter. He flies from London to Toronto, Buenos Aires to Berlin, Glasgow to Paris, performing, installing, curating, speaking. He has soundscaped rapid transit lines and hospital morgues. The Internet has been forced to increase its capacity to make room for all the digital content he uploads. Even the actual number of Robin Rimbauds had to multiply, when sixteen lookalikes performed at venues all over the world on the same evening.
The sheer variety is daunting. The original template of dirtying-up his aloof ambient music with a little messy human imperfection by snatching cell phone and police radio conversation out of the air and which gave him his stage name is now a palimpsest, erased and written over, over and over again. In the very recent past, he has gigged with his rock band Githead, worked with homeless kids in London, presented a soundscape marking his time as Visiting Professor at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains (on CD as “In-Between”), and mounted a brass work at the Cornish Floral Dance festival which left traditionalists scratching their noggins. He laid down some louche lounge on ten-inch vinyl with Michel Banabila and scored “Pavillon d’Armide,” glitch electronics chafing laquered, aged-in-the-wood Baroque opera, including familiar extracts from Handel´s opera “Rinaldo,” for Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, one of the most listenable musical hybrids of the year.
Musical collaborators are legion, but he’s never had one quite like David Rothenberg, professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and clarinetist-at-large. Rothenberg’s familiarity with the natural world is as profound as Rimbaud’s with the digital, having written a book called Why Birds Sing and recorded an interspecies duet with a laughing thrush. Not a peep on You Can’t Get There from Here, though; here, Rothenberg is the warbler – or is it babbler?
Rimbaud mines his laptop for sumptuous sounds, from run-out grooves, trembling strings, agonizing trumpets and ladies’ voices, propelled by sexy grooves, sometimes slinky, sometimes insistent. Rothenberg is not a torturer of his instrument but more of a loving companion, wielding it with the concentration of a Talmudist to coax out the full, round clarity of each note. Introspection informs “Black Betwixt Darkness” and extroversion “The Serpentine Way.” You might say Rimbaud takes a backseat to the more brazen lead instrument, but his work is rich, layered and inventive.
The project has taken shape over three years and that patience and craftsmanship is reflected in the final result. Not a sour note. Housed in a very attractive cover with ghosted title over a cover image that is either disturbing or very amusing.
You Can’t Get There from Here is available on Monotype. [Release page]
[itunes id=”460498198″]
