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Robin Storey refers to his work as “soundtracks”, and this programmatic aspect is as apparent as ever on Time Frost. Admittedly, its visual subject/object is entirely conceptual, playing in each listener’s head-cinema, but it does follow a Storey-ed script. His credentials as a sonorous screen-player are well-established, largely articulated in an esoteric netherworld of ritual/ethno ambient. The Rapoon project is one of some longevity, established in 1992, before which Storey was leading light in the dark ambient drones and industrial (m)alchemics of the :zoviet*france: collective, intrepid ethno-sonographers and sowers in the seeding bed of what was to grow into the thriving (post-) industrial ambient underground of the 90s. But back to concept...
Time Frost envisages the dystopian possibility of a new global warming-induced Ice Age enveloping Europe. Storey himself trails it as “...an imaginary recording of the mutational process of sound locked into ice and transformed over millenia.” This is mediated through slivers of sections of sound sliced from Strauss’s Blue Danube being choreographed into mutant motion. Fragments rent from one of our civilisation’s more iconic cultural artefacts lie in suspension, like ice-bound sonic fossils awaiting unearthing and interpretation by future archaeologists. But their inbetween glacier days are not cast in shadow’s sleep, but instead enter into a looping limbo of altered and altering states.
Rapoon has always been about loops and a certain trance-like reiteration, and Storey is not about to make radical shifts in compositional strategies. The new is in the source sounds and how they are manipulated and emplaced into conceptual frame. Segments of orchestral samples, variously treated, are hard panned back and forth across the sound stage to create the luminous fluid tableaux of initial movements, “Glacial Danube” and “Thin Light”, with a lighter shade of processing issuing in transparent icy timbres. These are essentially thematic variants run through filter modulations, arcing across their phase shifting replicas. The advent of “A Darkness of Snow” signals a gradual descent into more tenebrous terrain, streaked with more tonal grit and grime. The real heavyweight, though, is 34-minute centre/endpiece “Ice Whispers”. It first revisits the relative serenity of the early episodes, but then Storey’s material, always returning, protean, continously reflecting back on itself and shapeshifting, embarks on a sudden precipitous plunge. The listener is pulled down into a dark vortex in which the contours of the keynote phrase are thickly smudged into a whirling drone cloud teeming with treble scratch and bass rumble before returning, re-attenuated, to base, its keynote theme twirling above the frost-bound tundra. A journey, then, through cycles spun and message manipulated into meaning mist, which each must navigate by colour.
Review by Alan Lockett
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