Rapoon
(Copyright © 1999-2024 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
Dream Circle, 6.5/10
Raising Earthly Spirits, 6/10
Vernal Crossing, 7/10
Fallen Gods, 6/10
The Kirghiz Light, 7/10
Recurring, 6.5/10
Darker By Light, 7/10
Errant Angels, 5/10
Easterly 6 Or 7, 6/10
The Fires Of The Borderlands, 6.5/10
Just Say The Faith , 5/10
Nail Of Pious Bride , 6/10
Perfidious Albion , 5/10
Navigating By Colour , 5/10
What Do You Suppose , 5/10
Cold War , 5/10
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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Summary.
Rapoon, the brainchild of Zoviet France's Robin Storey, gave new meaning to the fusion of Indian and western music on albums such as Vernal Crossing (1993) and The Kirghiz Light (1995), exalted orgies of samples, loops and mixing that "used" drones and rhythms rather than "playing" drones and rhythms. He then converted to the mystical/contemplative style of Darker By Light (1996), Easterly 6 Or 7 (1997) and The Fires Of The Borderlands (1998), that basically reconciled his experiments with new-age music.


Full bio.
Robin Storey of Zoviet France launched the electronic and ambient project Rapoon, whose main drawback is its prolific output: had he made only one record, it would have been a supreme masterpiece.

Storey started out crafting a collection of mantra for samples, tabla and electronic melodies: Dream Circle (DOVEntertainment, 1992).

Storey then abandoned percussion on Raising Earthly Spirits (Staalplaat, 1993), however propelled by electronic beats.

With Vernal Crossing (Staalplaat, 1993) Storey found a magic balance between percussions and electronics. The Same River Once mixes exuberant Indian dance music and languid galactic drones and Bol Baya propels a distant chant with frantic tabla beats and the crescendo of a majestic ultrasonic wave. Sure, Storey is fascinated by percussions like a child with a new toy (a brief ethnic interlude such as Yi focuses on the hypnotic power of tribal drumming), but what transpires is also a genuine interest in sculpting sound: Rains builds a claustrophobic atmosphere out of the buzzing of a million crickets; the title-track is pure tragedy, enveloped in a shell of jarring noises, like one thousand sitars playing together and Tibetan monks releasing a solemn "om"; and Dahina Ta distorts ritual music to attain not only a transcendent state, but also a schizophrenic, neurotic alteration of mind. Occasionally, Storey's sophisticated experiments with electronic world-music match the intensity (if not the subtlety) of Steve Roach's futuristic/primitive landscapes.

The 18-song double album Fallen Gods (Staalplaat, 1994) continued in that direction expanding the portfolio of technical inspirations to Sufi dance (Dusk Red Walls), Australia, and Mediterranean folk music.

Storey's endeavour climaxed with the monumental double-disc album The Kirghiz Light (Staalplaat, 1995), an exalted orgy of samples, loops and mixing. Storey takes the intuition that Peter Gabriel had with the Passion and pushes it to another dimension. Storey's main focus returns to sound manipulation, leaving rhythm in the background. Compared with Storey's previous works, Jerewat comes as a shock: sinking in a bed of found noises, a mellower, fatalistic Diamanda Galas wails to a louder and louder heartbeat. After the African tom-tom and the gregorian choir of The Temple Shakes dissolve in a cloud of electronics, We Fell Like Rain returns to the human voice, which is now multiplexed and refracted, heavenly suspended to the repeated fragments of many similar voices, each resonating inside the others.
The sequencing of the tracks seems to highlight the compositional process. Later on, Jacobs Drum reintroduces the element of the dilated, multiplexed voice, but this time accompanied by percussions.
Frostling Merge gives new meaning to "percussions" by fusing them with electronics and chanting in one organic flow. Expanding on that concept, A Far Cry is one of the disc's emotional black holes, a fine-grained dust of pulses, drones and voices that concludes and summarizes this research program.
A parallel thread leads in the opposite direction, towards a smaller and smaller scale. The crackling sounds in the void of Rubinox and the eerie, phantom drones of Evacuate (a flute howling in the distance), the industrial vibrations and apocapyltic organ of Dala , the cosmic vortex of Meridia Closes, concede little of entertainment value and indulge instead in a feverish microscopic analysis of parcels of psyche.
The second disc opens, surprisingly, with a bacchanal of percussions, Omnizdum, and then rips through a harsh, industrial romp, We Danced Like Sticks, with distorted vocals, metallic noises and pounding rhythm. Into Light closes the album with a galloping rhythm and little or no melodic action, just a bleak rumble ignited by those stubborn beats, a settings reminiscent of a meeting between Tangerine Dream and Neu.
The ten minutes of electronic snowflakes that compose The Kirghiz Light restore order and peace, halfway between Constance Demby's sacred symphonies and Klaus Schulze's magniloquent impressionism. Compared with the monstruous cacophony of the rest, its calm sounds irrelevant.


(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Recurring (Staalplaat, 1996) turns toward a more "topological" sound, aiming for music that evokes the sound of emptiness. Tracks like Circle and Terran are challenging explorations of acoustic properties. (Three tracks are simply reissues from the first album).

Darker By Light (Soleilmoon, 1996) abandons the tabla background in favor of a rhythm machine. The music now hovers near new-age electronics, drawing inspiration from the most mystical and contemplative moments of cosmic music. The almost cinematic score of Night That Thunders (nine minutes), with its menacing cadence and galactic electronic gusts, represents a melodramatic turning point in Storey’s art. The soft drones of Winter's Edge (eight minutes) push ambient music to its extremes. With the ethnic influence gone, Storey paints natural landscapes with the flair of early Klaus Schulze. From Sleep Awake (eight minutes) and Prayer (ten minutes) achieve more subliminal and unsettling effects through careful use of background noises. The sound is elegant and polished.

After the live album Errant Angels (Soleilmoon, 1997), which returns to primitive ceremonials, Storey delivered with Easterly 6 Or 7 (Soleilmoon, 1997) a kind of summa of his art in manipulating ethnic sources (Falling More Slowly, which gradually extracts an Indian dance from a harmonious flow of indistinguishable sounds, or Rattling Sabers, where Aboriginal ceremonials are miniaturized and dissected); alongside the usual abstract soundscapes (the metaphysical nebula of Sign, the menacing "om" of Blow, the hissing drones of Variable 2, the anguished stasis of Waters Reaching).

In the end, however, it is always variations on the age-old concept of cosmic music, except that the German "couriers" also carried emotions, not just experiments (more retrograde than avant-garde). Storey’s emphasis is entirely on the technological aspect, somewhat like in the 1970s when composing electronic music was done for the sheer pleasure of making noise with machines. Storey overuses loops, stretching his music to the verge of boredom. This album, like the previous ones, should have lasted only a few minutes.

The Fires Of The Borderlands (Release, 1998) includes eleven new mid- to long-form compositions.

Unfortunately, Storey’s technique remains the same: a magma of sounds evolves slowly, but never loses its identity. Thus, Hollow Flight consists of a hiss of sibilant tones and galactic choirs that shifts gradually but stays the same for six minutes. This technique certainly works in the more concise pieces, in the ominous drone cloud of Groundswell, the gloomy ethnic experiment of Cires Divam (his specialty), the stunning vibration of Snake Of Earth, the thinning of monk-like choruses in Looking Not Finding (another specialty), and the woody percussiveness of Talking To A Stick, which are fundamentally just extensions of a path Brian Eno started with the watercolor textures of Before And After Science.

Over time, however, the project can become somewhat irritating: the drones in some tracks go nowhere, and anyone with Storey’s equipment could compose pieces like this. Storey simply stretches your favorite minute from a Klaus Schulze suite or early Tangerine Dream track to excess.
Omaneska has a fascinating premise: it places a crowd of cosmic voices in orbit, which gradually lose strength, leaving only a sinister mantra of ghostly whispers oscillating in the void. The development is almost metaphysical.

Storey floods the market with mediocre and repetitive albums. Just Say The Faith (Soleilmoon, 1998) is already ready, and could easily be condensed into a minor track on any of his previous records.

Nail Of Pious Bride (Soleilmoon, 1999), a collaboration with electronic composer Randy Greif, and Perfidious Albion (Soleilmoon, 1999), a collaboration with Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions, are self-indulgent works that rely on the strengths of the collaborators (the first is very ambient, the second very industrial).


(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)

D-Lem (Gracia Territori Sonor, 2000) documents a live performance.

Oedipus Brain Foil (Soleilmoon, 1999) is a collaboration with Nocturnal Emissions' Nigel Ayers and Randy Greif.

The trivial electronic manipulation of Navigating By Colour (Staalplaat, 1999), mainly a pretext to publicize his second life as a painter, and the sci-fi concept album What Do You Suppose (Staalplaat, 2000) show a tired composer who may have exhausted his tricks.

Cold War (Caciocavallo, 2001) is his experiment with drum'n'bass, although, after his processing and remixing of breakbeats, very little is left of the genre.

Monomyth (Manifold, 2005) is a collaboration with Birds of Tin.

From Shadows Sleep (Essence Music, 2006) was a remix of Zoviet France's Just An Illusion (1990)

Time Frost (2007)

Waiting By The River (Klanggalerie, 2016), the first Rapoon album in 12 years,

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