***Stray is the new album by ROBIN STOREY, otherwise known as RAPOON. His previous release for Soeilmoon was Melancholic Songs of the Desert, released in 2009. He has more than 50 albums and singles going back 20 years to his 1992 debut recording, Dream Circle. Improvisational, accoustic, electronic, and artfully arranged, the music of Rapoon is the auditory manifestation of impressionism. Robin Storey paints his songs with small details and fleeting impressions that evoke a mood or place in the listener’s imagination. Stray opens with a simple recording of a women’s choir, then in the next two tracks Storey transforms and transmutes the voices, adding pastel tones and rough shadows until the original canvas has been completely repainted. The fourth piece sprinkles tropical songbirds over distant drones and off-world rhythms, moving East until again, after two more songs, an entirely different atmosphere has emerged. The last three songs take up half of the album, and include two long pieces that comprise entire worlds unto themselves, from bedrock to mountaintop. Transitory, ephemeral clouds of sound flow down imaginary frozen canyons, pouring across weathered rocks and running to windswept shores, carrying sand, pollen and promises of spring’s renewal. Taken together, the nine songs on Stray are as gorgeous as they are oblique and engaging. Stray is presented in lavishly printed CD slipcase and folder with vellum overwrap. In a world of generic music sold in dull packaging, the exquisite cover created for this CD makes it an object to treasure, yet it...
CD $18.95
03/13/2012
***“These songs were composed during the last days of the Bush/Blair era and reflect the feeling of isolation and disconnection from any part of the political process and any sense of identification with the prevailing air of hostility and intolerance generated by this pair of religious xenophobes. The unjustified war in Iraq and the subsequent lies and propaganda engendered a feeling of revulsion and powerlessness. Once again it was ‘unpatriotic’ to criticize or protest against the government’s actions, and there was a rise in nationalism and extremist views. These songs are a retreat into the one place that no government has yet found a way into, the free and open spaces of the mind. They are spontaneous and mediative reflections looking for an inner peace in a world made ugly by hatred and war. They symbolize a kind of ‘walkabout’ and a reconnection with a lost sense of belonging spiritually, intellectually and physically with the world we inhabit. In a broader sense they also re-affirm long held sympathies with the thoughts of writers and philosophers such as Camus, Sartre and Burroughs, and the profound wisdom of eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Zen. The music here looks for a sense of inner being that one can only find in quiet isolation.”—Robin Storey
CD $15.50
07/27/2009