HALF MOON (medioriental musick)

RAPOON

VERNAL CROSSING


Original Issue: 1993 Staalplaat (STCD 082)

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Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

...lay back your head and drift...

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1 The Same River Once (10:35)
2 Sonol (2:41)
3 Yi (3:40)
4 Rains (6:02)
5 Bol Baya (9:07)
6 Dahina Ta (6:12)
7 Anatapurrah (7:47)
8 Vernal Crossing (11:16)
9 Yi-Tun (7:17)

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from The Wire:

Moving over to Rapoon (from Loop Guru), we've still got our ethnic trousers on but the spiritual vibe is less, shall we say, 'positive'. In fact listening to Rapoon late at night on your on can be pretty scary. I tell myself that it's just tablas fed through some kind of delay but the skin on my cocoa keeps shuddering...

The opening track is almost cheerful, tablas and rattles loping along in front of a long melody played by some sort of wind-up-the-chimney sound. Even here there's an ominous undertow. It's as though the music is heard from a car stranded in the desert with it's radio still playing.

The other tracks seem to be based on pulling Indian music to pieces - small drums play lonely abandoned patterns; fragments of voice float in and out on magic carpets of echo; buzzing clouds of drone spin from ear to ear; distant cries well up from the horizon...

Rapoon work against the usual sense of well-being engendered by Indian music to produce a menacing and fascinating piece of work. If you enjoyed being scared by :zoviet france: you should know that Rapoon is Robin Storey, one of their founding members.

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from i/e Magazine:

Former :zoviet*france: member Robin Storey continues his probing of the techno-tribal interface under the pseudonym Rapoon.

Vernal Crossing is more concerned with the exploration of esoteric rhythmic structures than the previous Raising Earthly Spirits, but it's still long on atmosphere and experimentation, and every bit as fascinating.

Storey combines the cut-and-paste sound designs of his former cohorts with the modes of Hassell, Roach, and mysterious, far-flung cultures in the realization of these multi-faceted works. As "Bol Baya" whips itself up into a frenzy of futurist gamelan and whispery electronic underpinnings, Storey then changes gears and abruptly enters a Middle Eastern / William Gibson twilight zone with "Dahina ta" or travels along a dirt road of tape loops and struck percussions during the surreal "Anatapurrah".

Gauge your acid drops as you embark on Rapoon's hallucinogenic