Rich, Robert

Artist: Robert Rich & Ian Boddy 
P: 2002    
DIN 11
LTD 2000 Copies
"Outpost" is the first collaboration between British synthesist Ian Boddy and American recording artist Robert Rich. Both Boddy & Rich have been involved in electronic music for over twenty years but have travelled very different musical paths. Rich is best known for his many releases on the Hearts of Space, Hypnos and Release/Relapse labels. Boddy's numerous electronic albums on his Something Else Records label garnered respect throughout Europe during this same period. Ian Boddy launched the DiN label in 1999 in order to stretch the boundaries of contemporary electronica, and has released a series of exceptional limited edition releases including several of his own solo and collaborative albums.
Together, Rich and Boddy have concocted a mysterious blend of fluid electronic rhythms and impressionistic 50's Sci-Fi soundscapes. With tools ranging from vintage and modern analog modular synthesizers, prepared piano, metallic percussion, feedback networks, and digital signal processing, the two musicians have crafted a sonic journey to the remote edge of a future, lost civilization.
Unlike many other "virtual" long-distance collaborations, Boddy and Rich preferred to work together in the same space, allowing musical ideas to flow between them spontaneously. Boddy first travelled to California for a week, where he and Rich started recording "Outpost" in Rich's studio. A month later, Rich travelled to Northern England, where he and Boddy finished the album at DiN. Rich then completed the final mixing and mastering back at his Soundscape studio.
Full of surprising transitions and dynamic extremes, "Outpost" shows these two veteran recording artists stretching their music into new vocabularies. Four sections of the album feature pulsating rhythms from Rich's MOTM modular synthesizer. Boddy departs from his normally electronic voicings with abstract textural interludes on prepared piano, which he performed on the 1925 vintage baby grand in Rich's studio.
Interwoven with NASA broadcasts, ionospheric radio whistlers, Boddy's extreme Metasynth excursions, and Rich's signature steel guitar, "Outpost" promises to take the listener to new sonic terrain.

Artist: Robert Rich & Ian Boddy 
P: 2005   
DIN 21
LTD 2000 Copies
"Lithosphere" is the second collaborative release between DiN label boss Ian Boddy & American ambient pioneer Robert Rich. Following on from their debut album "Outpost" (DiN 11 - 2002) the duo once again decided to eschew the false economy of a purely virtual collaboration and convened at Rich's Californian Soundscape studio to physically work together over an intense period of 10 days. Following Boddy's departure Rich then honed and fine-tuned the arrangements before finalising the mastering of the project.
Whereas "Outpost" was sonically 'out there' and was perceived by many to have it's heart in the realms of space music, "Lithosphere" has a more earthy, organic quality. Once again the album is centered around Rich's signature lap steel guitar voicings and deep bass machinations of his analogue MOTM modular system. However Boddy's input is once again unexpected in it's direction with astonishing sound design elements intermingling with delicate keyboard textures using high quality sampled glass & stone percussion instruments together with haunting string & woodwind loops.
One of the binding forces for this album was the duos decision to utilise an alternate just intonation tuning. This at times gives the harmonies a piquant flavour whereas at others a glistening quality that just adds to the sonic exotica that Boddy & Rich have concocted on "Lithosphere".
Boddy has always pushed the aspect of collaborations within his DiN catalogue and "Lithosphere" shows the true advantage such a philosophy brings to bear musically on the labels output. The album is a true reflection of the two artists combined efforts and could only have been produced with their joint work ethic. "Outpost" is one of the most popular DiN albums. There's every chance that "Lithosphere" could surpass the high standard that it's illustrious predecessor has set.

Artist: Robert Rich & Markus Reuter
P: 2007 
The Rich/Reuter collaboration is called "Eleven Questions". It's at times intense, rhythmic, melodic, quirky, a bit noisy, and it should come out in Autumn.
We're hoping this CD might surprise you a bit. Thirteen short pieces fall together as a sort of puzzle, sometimes odd and playful, sometimes rather intense. This international collaboration was conceived, composed and recorded in person in one intense week at Robert Rich's Soundscape studio in California. Rich then completed, mixed and mastered the work over the subsequent two months.
Unlike most releases of the ambient/electronica genre, each piece on Eleven Questions has an instant hookiness. The songs form short, concise statements. The album features mostly acoustic and electro-acoustic instruments (lap steel, touch guitar, piano, acoustic guitar, flutes) rather than synthesizers. With audiophile sensibilities, Rich and Reuter employed the best of custom tube, vintage and contemporary studio equipment to craft a unique sonic landscape.
This is an album for lovers of modern movie soundtracks, sound fanatics and people who look for beauty and melody in contemporary music.
Markus Reuter - Touch Guitar, Acoustic Guuitar, Piano
Robert Rich - Sound Design, Piano, Flutes, Lap Steel Guitar
SiRenée - Voices

Artist: Michael Brückner
P: 2012 / 2022
10 years earlier, in 2012, Michael published his first label release on SynGate's newly founded sub-label "Luna", for which the musician and graphic designer also designed the logo. Since then, this album has been one of Michael Brückner's personal favorites among the albums he recorded. The new re-release is now much more than a re-release, in fact completely new tracks were created when the individual pieces were not only remixed but completely reinterpreted by other artists that Michael had invited to this project. The excellent participating artists on ELEVENTH SUN are:
- ZenSugar
- Robert Rich
- Mathias Grassow
- Markus Reuter
- Forrest Fang
- J. Peter Schwalm100
Michael says: "I'm really impressed and happy how the new versions have taken shape through the hands of the immensely talented artists. The double album offers the remix with the artists involved on CD1 and the original album from 2012 on CD2 The album features the remix with the artists involved above.

Artist: Perceptual Defence + Robert Rich
P: 2020
2 long flowing ambienttracks with Robert Rich playing his brilliant Steel Guitar.

Artist: Robert Rich & Alio Die 
P: 1997
Rich & Musso are at their best here; they made seven well-defined tracks, sparkled with sensuality and riding along a very gentile rhythm. Unlike the dark ambient genre, this CD doesn't get lost in cheap soundeffects & it certainly doesn't give you a unbearable headache! This is Rich's strongest, most profound collaborative effort since his outings with Steve Roach (Strata, Soma). Teaming up with Alio Die (aka Stefano Musso), this rich, organic soundscape seems to speak to the listener at the primordial and cellular level. These immersive sonic/musical explorations are as sad and haunting as they are beautiful and rejuvenating. Definitely an album to lose yourself in.

Artist: Robert Rich & Faryus
P: 2008   
Deep drone ambient textures and dense atmospheres, presented in six uninterrupted partsby Robert Rich and Faria label owner Andrey Sadovnikov. Mixed and mastered by Robert Rich.
Tangential glimpses remotely echoed, untethered from touch. No time nor place, no past nor future, internal, external. Sculpting from energy, clouded motion vaguely slipping. Evanescent vibration, without meaning apart from its own open secret.

Here the last copy!

Artist: Robert Rich & Ian Boddy 
P: 2008   
DIN 29
LTD 2000 Copies
React is the third collaboration between American ambient pioneer Robert Rich and DiN label boss Ian Boddy. However, unlike their previous two studio outings on the DiN label, Outpost (2001) and Lithosphere (2005), this is a record of their first ever live performance at the Star’s End Radio Show 30th Anniversary Celebration Concert in Philadelphia in June 2007.

The duo forge a fascinating sonic collaboration that allows for glimpses of each other’s musical personalities to be seen within the evolving musical landscape. Boddy is mainly responsible for the rhythmic content which he mutates and morphs from the sonic input of Rich’s MOTM modular system. There are references to a couple of tracks from Outpost (Ice Fields and The Edge of Nowhere) and the title track of Lithosphere but they’re presented in a more energised and dynamic version. Meanwhile Rich paints a tapestry of sound with muted keyboards, flutes and his trademark gliss lap steel guitar voicing.

The music ebbs and flows from abstract soundscapes through gentle reveries to up tempo sections that combine thunderous analogue bass and glitchy percussion overlain with a mesmerising mix of keyboards, flutes and gliss guitar. A truly unique concert performance by two of the most accomplished musicians in modern ambient electronica.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P: 1995
You can rate this as one of the best ambient recordings ever, but the material on it is different, engaging, and ideally meditative fare. The concept of the project is perhaps the most interesting part of it: an attempt to extract the slow, introductory part of the raga called the "alap" from its usual role and recast it as a stand-alone kind of ambient or trance music. In this effort Moskow provides a wandering, ethereal, Eno-like kind of play on the sarod over Rich's electronics and multi-instrumental backings. There are six parts to the cd, each of about ten minutes in length, but the division seems superfluous. This cd will either take its listener by storm, or produce a kind of effect that will lead to a couple of quick plays followed by permanent dust-collecting on the shelf.

Artist: Robert Rich & Markus Reuter
P: 2017
This is the second collaboration between Robert Rich and Markus Reuter (touch guitarist and 1/3 of the group Stick Men with King Crimson’s Tony Levin and Pat Mastelotto.) Rich’s slow piano and Reuter’s glitchy guitar drones make a brooding reference to Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s collaborations, imagined through a clouded lens.
Swimming defiantly upriver, through sonic swirls, fractal shards and crystalline clouds.
Troubled, yet calm; an incantation to transform the luminous darkness.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P: 2004    
While better known for his electronic textures, Robert Rich often includes piano solos during his live concerts.
Open Window documents his improvisational approach to acoustic piano, with influences ranging from Alan Hovhannes, G.I. Gurdjieff and Erik Satie to Terry Riley and Keith Jarrett.
Rich chose to record Open Window on his own 1925 vintage A.B. Chase baby grand, an instrument with a more intimate sound than a full-size concert piano.
Over a period of two months, he kept a daily schedule of piano improvisation, with microphones set up to record at all times. The pieces selected here reflect special moments during this concentrated period.
These were the moments when effort vanished, and the music seemed to write itself.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P: 1996
Pieces composed for compilations from 1993 to 1995 reflecting a static tension a calm surface hiding subterranean turmoil.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P: 1998   
Collection of tracks recorded from '96 to '98 for compilations, plus one new piece.
Below zero is a CD which consists of six selections that were previously issued on various compilation CD's with the exception of track 2.
Below zero is a departure from Robert's more recent projects. Below zero explores the dark and mysterious side of Robert's music.
This CD is reminiscent of Trances/ Drones, however the selections on this CD create an ominous aural soundscape that may be uncomfortable for some. Fans of Dark Ambient music should relish the dark nature of this CD, while Robert's mainstream fans may be alienated by the morose content of this CD.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P:  2001  
Bestiary is rhythmic, energetic, bizarre and very glurpy. It's filled with mutated electronic textures from the MOTM analog modular synthesizer, granular synthesis, chaotic feedback systems and formant filtering, and peppered with twisted contributions from Forrest Fang, Andrew McGowan, and Haroun Serang. Many of the sounds on Bestiary come from the MOTM modular synthesizer by Synthesis Technology. The album actually started with the intention of making a second ACID loop library for Sonic Foundry, following Liquid Planet. I started developing a library of extreme analog sounds, which could only have come from a modular synth. As the synth began to grow, I became more enchanted by the range of timbres it could produce.
It sounded so much better than the modular synth that I had built back in the seventies, yet the working method was still visceral and familiar. At a certain point I decided that these new sounds should form the backbone of my next solo album, so I stopped working on the ACID loop concept and began structuring the sounds into compositions.
I assembled the album as one continuous piece, with all of the crossfades and transitions built into a single 53 minute file in Cubase VST32 on a Macintosh G3. Actually, I only used the audio features of Cubase. MIDI played a very small role, since I performed most of the parts directly to hard disk from the modular synth.
Most of the additional parts came from processed acoustic sources, often mangled with time-domain algorithms in Tom Erbe's SoundHack or a strange utility called Argeiphontes Lyre. Other methods included feedback techniques similar to those that I used on Troubled Resting Place and Below Zero. I recorded and mixed the album at 24 bit resolution, through the Mackie d8b digital mixer, and downsampled to CD at the final stage of mastering.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P: 2006
Echo of Small Things takes Rich's talent for crafting evocative atmospheric ambient tone poems to an almost dizzying level. The integration of assorted environmental sounds (someone walking, the happy gurgling of a baby, nocturnal creatures, rain, wind and thunder) with constantly evolving layers of assorted electro organic musical elements is so flawless, so perfect, and so involving that you always find yourself entirely absorbed in the recording, even when you don't want to be. Besides the usual assortment of Rich musical instrumentation (his wonderfully emotive pedal steel guitar, his always sensual flutes, and various and sundry tones, drones and effects), Rich incorporates new (for him) synthesizer instrumentality, e.g. a TimewARP 2600, which doesn't just add new wrinkles to his trademark ambient compositions, but also introduces a whole new life to the music at times.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P: 2006    
On Electric Ladder, Robert Rich finds a new voice for the vibrant interlocking melodies that characterized his works such as Numena, Geometry and Gaudí.
With its seemless blend of analog modular synthesizers and acoustic tonalities, Electric Ladder weaves a hypnotic spell - lush, ecstatic and seductive. Its shimmering geometric lines grow more sharply etched with the clarity of just intonation tunings and the intelligence that pervades Rich's compositional vocabulary.
Electric Ladder is a lush ambient CD for those enjoying sequential arrangements softened by mournful overlays. The later pieces are almost ecstatic - dreamy, drifting and transporting.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P: 2015
Shimmering, pulsating, woven patterns of electrical filagree echo hidden structures that permeate space and time, inspired by our latest forays in cosmology and the constant search to understand our place in the vastness.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P: 1991    
Inspired by the unorthodox, surreal architecture of renowned Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi (who was reportedly once called the "Dante of architecture"), this album finds Rich exploring appropriately abstract and stimulating sonic terrain. Keep in mind that the natural harmonics of just intonation come into play, and the mesmerizing results are appealingly otherworldly.
The first four tracks engage your ears with continually interweaving tapestries of synths, winds, and mallet percussion, and they constantly find new patterns to morph into. Like Gaudi's buildings, these instrumental compositions twist and turn in unforeseen ways.
The next four pieces dive into deep, dark, and less rhythmic ambient locales, slowing down the pace before the appropriately titled "Mosaic" re energizes the album with more kinetic, electro-acoustic sound sculpting that brings the album full circle, recalling his previous Geometry opus. At first listen, Gaudi comes off as one of Rich's more cryptic works, but successive listens prove that it is also one of his most fascinating.

Artist: Robert Rich 
P: 1987 / 1991
This reissue of his early album. One can hear the seeds being lain for the organic Rainforest, Geometry was inspired by the mathematical relationships between the notes in just intonation. There are three main types of compositions here droning atmospheres, percolating ethnoambient works, and electronic pieces intertwining layers of sequenced melodies and rhythms in mind-boggling ways. Rather than set his sequencers on stun with rigid rhythms on these latter cuts, he mixes ever-changing programmed polyrhythms with live keyboard playing in beguiling ways, steadfastly proving that electronic musicians can be far more than pedestrian knob-twiddlers.

Here the last copy of the rare Spalax label release!