VARIOUS
– escaping from color: rapoon recomposed remixed
(CD,
Quasi Pop)
Rapoon is a sort of a myster, at least to me. I
remember approximately 15 or 20 years back, I first heard about Rapoon when
somebody suggested to write about his music for a fanzine that I also wrote
for. I had no clue what the guy was talking about, but I voted yes
especially for this reason. Maybe I was too young and too lively (and too
much interested in punkrock and noiserock) to get deeply into the aftermaths
of the first or second Industrial Revolution in music, where Rapoon aka
Robin Stovey came from. I don’t remember ever having heard anything by
Zoviet France either, which is where Stovey made his fame before going solo
with more intuitive and introspective music, because that was too early for
me. Being open for anything doesn’t mean that anything might come your way
some time.
Ever since then my contacts with Rapoon’s music have
been more off than on but I couldn’t say if it was me not getting in the
right places, him not doing much or just the two of us in different parts of
the world. It couldn’t have been Rapoon releasing to little, because in
just a few years he has released an impressive number of records. Quasi Pop
now released a compilation of artists who, as its subtitle suggests,
recompose and remix Rapoon. And the most mysterious thing about it is, that
they seem to get directly to the core of what I had in memory is the basis
of Rapoon’s music. This means that experimental musicians as different as Aidan Baker, Anla Courtis,
TV Pow, Machinefabriek, Troum or Gert Jan Prins, to name but a few, leave
their personal idiosyncracies and obessions at home and deliver an album
that is strikingly compact and monodirected in sound. The single tracks fade
into one another and without looking at the display of your CD-player it is
hard to tell were one track starts and the next ends.
“Escaping from color” starts with subsonic bass
sounds that soon sink into more audible territory. All of the drones are
intriguing and transcending, a dark blue like diving in the ocean, with
sounds drifting by that may come from hundred miles off. Movements are slow
and lucid, but they are also big and impressive. Do you know the feeling
when swimming in the sea and you experience the currents slowly dragging you
in a certain direction? That feeling of imminent danger but also everlasting
security in the womb of mother earth? That kind of movement. Hard to
describe, maybe because it is such a deeply rooted, all encompassing
universal feeling.
The title by the way hints at the fact that Rapoon
originally was a painer, a visual artist. Usually in reviews of his music
writers will refer to landscapes of the mind and certain fields of swirling
colours that appear while listening (as I have done above in certain ways).
Maybe Rapoon has been working on getting away from this viewpoint to a more
minimalistic, mono-aural and single.dimensional approach that is
nevertheless powerful and fascinating. Like Picasso refusing all colours but
blue or John Cage refusing to use two thirds of the harmony spectrum.
Some of the artists presented on this compilation have
experienced or are currently in similar phases of their work, but then
again, as I said in the beginning, it seems as if they all got into the same
track sooner or later and tried to stay true to the Rapoon-sound. Which
maybe makes this compilation of “tributes” (are there other people out
there who have all kinds of problems with the usual concept of a tribute
album?) the best place to start digging into Rapoon.
