Robert Rich - From sleep concerts to the dark ambient of Risveglio

Robert Rich is one of the great theorists of musical renewal at the end of the twentieth century, standing at the crossroads between the avant-garde and popular music.

Born in Menlo Park, California, in 1963, he began recording his music at a very young age, releasing his first cassette, Sunyata, in 1981. At the time he was studying mathematics and psychology at Stanford University, where he graduated four years later. Rich quickly became known for his sleep concerts, acoustic soundscapes that lasted all night (attendees were advised to bring a sleeping bag). Several recordings of these live events exist, originally released on cassette and now available on CD. Inner Landscape faithfully documents what was heard in the gymnasium at the University of Berkeley on March 9, 1985.

Rich's early works, Sunyata, Trance and Drones, contain experiments in psychoacoustics: long streams of sound that, according to the artist's intentions, should be listened to in a state between sleep and wakefulness. These are liquid compositions in which structure and content become one and the same.

The influences Rich distills into his music, from India to Pauline Oliveros's concept of deep listening music, are varied, but all traceable back to the cultural climate of America's most progressive university. What is missing from Rich's music are the mystical overtones that so saturated the nascent new age music of that era. On the contrary, Rich's art has been seen precisely as a secular vision of the animist spiritualism reborn after '68.

With Geometry and Numena, both recorded between 1983 and 1987, Robert Rich temporarily sets aside ambient textures to focus on more structured music. This time his models are Klaus Schulze and the minimalists (Terry Riley above all). As a mathematician at heart, Rich sees beauty in form, and what he's trying to do at this stage of his career is strip away content, or at least minimize its scope.

Rainforest, Rich's first album for the American label Heart Of Space, is emblematic in this sense: it's his "lightest" record and also his most commercially successful. The instrumental timbres Rich uses are clear and crystalline across all nine compositions on the album, while the atmospheres drift through reassuring new-age territory.

In the late '80s, Robert Rich meets Steve Roach, and the two musicians begin a partnership that would last only a few years but yield incredible results. Chief among them are the two albums released under the name Rich & Roach on Heart Of Space in 1990 and 1992. Strata and Soma are two "deep ambient" masterpieces, in which Steve Roach's love of the desert blends perfectly with Rich's hallucinated rhythmic structures. The first album is the stronger of the two for its balance: light and shadow alternate harmoniously across its eleven compositions. Soma, by contrast, leans into darker tones, favoring psychedelic digressions over purely ecstatic ones.

With the album Gaudí (1991), Rich finally makes explicit his fascination with the art of the great architect Antonio Gaudí, who managed to fuse the organic with the mathematical in his buildings - much as the Californian musician has been trying to do for years with his music. In musical terms, the record is a step backward, closer to Geometry than to Strata. The instrumental timbres are "clean" and the structures heavily shaped by mathematics. The few compositions that try to dodge these rules ("Silhouette", "Spiral Steps") get lost in new-age mannerism. The sense of déjà vu is even stronger with Propagation, which feels like Rich's attempt to sell a few more copies of his records - how else to explain this watered-down world music dressed up with piano-bar arrangements? Up to this point, after all, Rich's only commercial success had come from the reassuring new age of Rainforest, and the seven compositions on Propagation seem to take their cue directly from that record. Not even the cameos from the talented Lisa Moskow and Forrest Fang are enough to rescue a mediocre album.

As if by magic, Rich decides to keep following the path opened up by his collaborations with Steve Roach and releases a mini-CD on the Italian label Amplexus containing 20 minutes of stellar music, Night Sky Replies. Meanwhile, Heart Of Space also puts out an album of Indian music recorded with Lisa Moskow, Yearning. A successful experiment, though hardly a definitive statement on the genre in question (Indian alaap). What interests Rich is exploring the stillness before the storm, forever in search of the perfect trance.

1995 doesn't close before Rich releases his darkest record, a collaboration with the ceremonial master of darkness Lustmord. Stalker is a tribute to the great Edward Artemiev, the Russian composer behind the original score for Tarkovsky's film, from which the collaboration between Robert Rich and Brian Williams takes its name. Here Rich is almost unrecognizable: he abandons entirely the organic quality of his music in search of forms of art closer to silence. The ambient music of "Stalker" is dark as the arctic night, motionless and bottomlessly deep. "Undulating Terrain" is the only track under six minutes: Rich dares to lay flute lines over Lustmord's austere electronic textures before darkness swallows everything once again ("Point Of No Return").

A Troubled Resting Place (Hearts of Space/Fathom, 1996) collects many of the tracks scattered across various compilations released over the previous five years. The tracklist also includes the EP "Night Sky Replies" in its entirety. From this same period comes the collaboration with Paul Schutze, "Narratives" (Manifold, 1996), which pushes even further the isolationism staged on Stalker.

With the invaluable help of Alio Die, Robert Rich records another masterpiece, Fissures (Fathom, 1997; Projekt, 2006). The album's seven compositions recall the glories of Trances and Drones, but with a more mature approach. The music flows amorphously through the full hour-plus of "Fissures", while flutes dance liquidly over electronic structures tinged with the sacred. It's Alio Die's naturalism seeping into Rich's icy psychoacoustics. "Turning To Stone" opens this incredible work, and the senses immediately lose their usual bearings: time stretches and perceptions feel muffled. That's the effect of the bath of organic electronics in which the two musicians immerse the listener. Where the percussion recalls the collaborations with Roach ("A Canopy Of Shivers"), the atmosphere takes on ritualistic overtones.

In 1998 Robert Rich released two albums that embody the two sides of his music. Below Zero (Side Effects, 1998; Soundscape Productions, 2005) is a dark album, built on the metallic sounds of the wave generators the Californian musician had come to love after working with Lustmord. The compositions are often chaotic, lacking any clearly defined arrangement. By contrast, the music on Seven Valis (Hearts Of Space, 1998) is, in its own way, "sunlit" - well organized and arranged with flutes, guitars (David Torn even makes an appearance), cello and dulcimer, following the rules of traditional harmony. The album is a step forward from the majestic calm of Rainforest and represents a culmination point for Rich's musical research.

At this stage in his career, the musician from Menlo Park decides not to keep exploring the many paths already opened up over fifteen years of musical research, but instead to pause and think about new routes to discover. Over the course of two years Rich reissues some of his older work, and for Mike Griffin's prestigious label Hypnos he releases a triple concert album (Humidity, Hypnos/Soundscape, 2000), which serves as a summa of the previous five years of his career. It consists of three separate concerts recorded between April and May 1998. An imposing work in which Rich improvises around the themes of the albums he holds dearest. In 2001, also on Hypnos, comes an audio DVD, "Somnium", containing an internal sleep concert lasting seven hours. These are two works dedicated to longtime fans, wonderful objects, but ones nobody would recommend as a first approach to the Californian composer's music.

Bestiary (Release/Relapse, 2001) brings substantial novelty. For the first time the sound is compressed with digital effects, and the compositions - with the exception of the long closing "Premonition Of Circular Clouds" - are shot through with spasmodic electric charges, as if almost reaching for a pop effect. "Nasting On Cliffside" and "Carapace Hides The Delivery" show Rich pulling almost glitch-like magic out of his self-built modular synthesizers. This isn't a path that suits the Californian particularly well, but it's certainly a way of opening up new horizons.

The two collaborations with the great Ian Boddy (Outpost, 2002; Lithosphere, 2005) in some ways reflect this restless urge for change. Boddy is a master of synth music, with two decades of experience behind him. Rich might seem to have little in common with the Englishman, but the two albums released on DiN prove otherwise. This is especially true of the second one: the electronic textures Boddy builds, using among other things the sounds of glasses and lightly struck stones, are colored by Rich's lap-guitar, processed through his "analogue MOTM modular system", an instrument capable of lending depth to any mid-to-low frequency. The ten compositions on Lithosphere never run longer than eight minutes, a sign of both musicians' determination to stay grounded in the earthly reality of sound, without losing themselves, this time, in "space" excursions.

Temple Of The Invisible (Soundscape, 2003) and Open Window (Soundscape, 2004) are the flip side of Bestiary, where Rich abandons electronics altogether to focus on the timbres of acoustic instruments. But while on the first of the two albums Robert tries to recreate the exotic atmospheres of some of his earlier work without using synthesizers, on the second he appears in the unprecedented guise of a (post-)minimalist pianist. One's thoughts inevitably turn to Terry Riley and his solo-piano records. The eight compositions on Open Window don't reach the heights of the masters Rich draws inspiration from, yet they do reveal the undeniable melodic gifts of a musician in search of perfect harmony.

Calling Down The Sky (Soundscape, 2003) opens with the lengthy "Erasing Traces", which immediately plunges the listener into an ocean of ambient sound: the percussion is barely sketched in, and Rich's guitar arpeggiates sinuously amid synthesizer beds that merge like waves on the surface of the sea. With "Overhead" we begin descending into the abyssal depths reached in the following track, "Vertigo", more than 20 minutes of watery drone through which a didgeridoo slowly winds for the entire length of the piece. Rich retraces, on his own, what he learned from his encounters with Boddy. With Echo of Small Things (Soundscape, 2005) too, the Menlo Park composer resumes putting organic sounds and mathematical structures into dialogue, across an hour of ecstatic ambient music.

Electric Ladder falls a notch below the previous works, even though across its 55 minutes it still displays many of the hallmarks of Robert Rich's music. The title track "Electric Ladder" opens the album with a circular bed of digital percussion reminiscent of the sharp-edged atmospheres of Bestiary. The sound then settles into synth beds over which, as in minimalist compositions, the woodwinds played by Rich are added and subtracted. Far from the abyssal stillness of Soma and Stalker, Rich is searching for a new identity and new recognition for his music.

After a handful of divisive works, Robert Rich rediscovers the imagination of his finest material thanks to a series of collaborations with Ian Boddy, Markus Reuter and, above all, Luca Formentini. Their unmissable 2022 collaboration, For Sundays When It Rains, underscores the superb skill of two extraordinary musicians. The ancient alliance between sound and imagination in the hands of two masters of Ambient: the twelve tracks on the record sketch out a cosmogony of harmonic beauty, a luminous chlorophyll that irrigates every space and every element, weaving a sublime sonic tapestry. The album's opening track, "First Day", is already pure enchantment. The two musicians have only just met. It sounds as though they're still tuning their instruments. Instead, they've already created a masterpiece, like the opening of "In A Silent Way", able to transport you in an instant to a dreamlike dimension. The first day was the ecstasy of watching raindrops move in slow motion, in a cosmic dance.

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