Rapoon, Time Frost (Glacial Movements)

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As Rapoon, Robin Storey can assume a number of guises. His audio work can be so dark as to be toxic, oily dark, nightmares of industry, fresh hells. He can also toss varied-coloured tiles at the wall and create wonderful and byzantine mosaics which range in mood from giddy to threatening. Good examples of such work include his double CD "Cold War", or his recent release on Vivo, "Obscure Objects of Desire".

However, his name is associated almost as much with the cold, desolate regions the label Glacial Movements has staked out as its own. And Time Frost is a kind of opus in celebration of the Arctic, its serpentines of loose snow dancing across the tundra. If the landscape is monochrome and featureless to many of us, Storey finds this inspirational rather than tedious and uses looping and repetition as his guiding aesthetic.

In his liner notes, Storey posits a textural theme as well, based on scientific speculation that global warming may weirdly enough bring down a new Ice Age on Europe. In order to imagine a Danube that has finally, really turned blue because it has frozen over, he uses "tiny fragments of music from an iconic European composition, Johann Strauss's Blue Danube". In fact, trumping one meta-fiction with another, he exclusively used locked grooves from the soundtrack to the equally-iconic movie, Stanley Kubrick´s "2001". (Interestingly, it has been done equally well before. Several years back, Andrew Deutsch released "Loops Over Land" on his tiny label Magic If, in which all the samples were created from locked grooves looping the music of Gustav Mahler.)

Imagining further into the future, post-Ice Age, when the glaciars recede and future archeologists sift through what we left behind, "Time Frost is an imaginary recording of the mutational process of sound locked into ice and transformed over millenia. Like ghosts of music trapped in an evershifting permafrost."

It´s an unspeakably beautiful five-part suite, in which maybe more purely than ever before over the course of an entire hour-long album, Rapoon succeeds in evoking not only the deceitful barrenness of the far north, its white-on-white textures, but also the bite of its cold air, the sting of snow moving horizontally on the cheek, the smell of the place - for it does indeed have its own special smell.

Among his most beautiful listening experiences.

http://www.glacialmovements.com