Rapoon — Alien Glyph Morphology
This is my first foray into the prolific world of Rapoon, which is the sound child of Robin Storey founder of influential post industrial uk music collective Zoviet France. I’ll have to admit I’m highly impressed, he manages to present a mix of sounds that is very alien, yet beautiful - balancing between been disorienting and strangely comforting, making very much his own sound that mixers together ambience, world music, jazz, electronica and rich often odd atmospherics’. There’s a lot more synthetic sounding jazz colour here than I was led to believe in the past with his work- he’s often written off as beign just tribal ambience which really sells it way short as there’s so much more going on here than that. It’s a difficult sound to describe which in its self makes it very worthwhile beign alien, spiritual, musty and ghostly - like music from another planet or an alternative dimension that runs along side ours and takes sound element's from our dimension.
A few stand out moments include the opener Chromium Dreams that mixes stretched glitch tones and beats, with synthetic jazz blurred sax like tones, vibe tones and sampled ‘come in and out of focus’ bizarre dialogue in which a house break in and weapons of mass destruction are detailed, all mixed into a dreamy, bizarre, dense and hypnotic sound soup. Or track Seven Condensed Nightmares which is built around African plain electro rhythms, spacey yet somehow earthy synth curls and drifts. With later on drifting into space sax tones and strange chanted eastern/ yet slightly occultic vocal elements.
It all comes in a very nice textured yellow and brown hand-made paper folder with a hand made paper white inner sleeve & not surprisingly it is ltd to 400 copies. The
Packaging nicely tops off the rather special, distinctive collection tracks within.