Glurp of the wild

>> Robert Rich’s Bestiary is rich in biodiversity

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Throughout his 20-year career, pioneering ambient musicmaker Robert Rich has engaged in that quixotic pursuit—expressing the inexpressible. Given his hypnogogic Sleep Concerts, collabs with Steve Roach and myriad musical expeditions into the most tenebrous corners of the collective psyche, it’s almost paradoxical that the principle behind his latest release Bestiary should seem so clear-cut, at least at the outset—the tracks therein positively squirm with imaginary life, deliberately suggesting magnified field recordings of impossible life forms. But the contradiction is deliberate too.

“In most cases, my albums don’t solidify down to one simple theme,” Rich explains. “There are often layers of meaning. The word ‘bestiary’ is certainly coming from the medieval texts of mythobiology, but what the sounds are in fact trying to do is create concrete abstract forms—like an Yves Tanguy or Joan Miró painting.”

Rich sees Bestiary as an answer to the challenge put forth by surrealist prime mover André Breton back in the ’20s. “He said, essentially, that music could never satisfactorily express a surrealist idea. In his mind, music was an abstract form following mathematical rules, whereas surrealism was the concretization of the breaking of rules. It was anti-abstraction.
“What Breton couldn’t have anticipated was the role of electronics in creating new, unknowable and unrepeatable sound structures.”

Yeah, and Rich’s own role in that process. Book-learnin’ brainiac that he is, he’s not afraid to use onomatopoeic terms like “glurp” and “shimmer” in a formal sense (and there’s glurps and shimmers a-plenty on Bestiary).

“My work has a reputation for being quote-unquote dark and serious. This isn’t really a serious album! It’s got its dark moments, and I sure hope some people take it seriously, but it’s also meant to be funny. I wanted some of these sounds to jump out of the speakers and make people laugh!”

Okay, sure, as long as they don’t leave sticky stuff all over my new amplifier… :

With Gordon Field and Neerav at the World Beat Centre on Friday, April 5, 9pm sharp!, $15