(2020) Robert Rich - Offering to the Morning Fog


Review:
No matter which aspect of life in this country you examine, fear is on the increase, which makes an album such as Offering to the Morning Fog all the more welcome. Fortunately, synthesist and sound designer Robert Rich doesn’t coddle, as do so many artists with the “New Age” category foisted upon them. Rather, he provides an enveloping experience injected with a bit of adrenaline to keep listening fresh throughout what, despite being split, is really a single long piece. Rich has been on the scene for some three decades, but a solo effort like 2018’s Tactile Ground gives little indication of his collaborative work with Lustmord. What that solo effort has in common with Morning Fog is a gorgeously subtle use of sibilance as ambiance. Tactile Ground afforded tableaus over which static environments immersed and retreated amidst a kaleidoscopic shift in harmony, effect and timbre, while breathy sounds provided a layer of transient glue, moving around the soundstage, holding the project together. Morning Fog scales things back in favor of what might be described as a unified sonic experience, a relatively bare bones dialogue of harmonic wash and varied layers of flute. The natural soundscapes, so much a part of his vocabulary and front and center in his other works, are present but backgrounded. The flute is given solo or small group status throughout, but even before it enters on “Distant Traveler,” listeners can anticipate its sussurations in blooming sonorities that waft between the speakers. Those Protean harmonies are palpable as they stretch down toward a foundational bass, and those with capable equipment will feel the reassurance of steady low frequencies. Over this sand-through-the-hourglass backdrop, the flute emerges organically, connected by breath and the visceral sensations of well-integrated ornament and delay. Rich’s flute work has always encompassed a subtle set of transcultural parameters but nowhere more than here. I wonder if those initial harmonies are woven of manipulated flute timbres, but either way, notions of background and foreground are subverted by a unity of sonic purpose. The sliding and gliding emergences atop the pitch spectrum blend subtlety and ambiguity. Listen at 3:00 into “Awake When Shadows Walk” to hear the melodic fluidity iced with shards of glass as the flute prepares for another series of what it is too easy to call long-breathed phrases. Of course, the flute is the guiding force here, or at least the emotive foil against which everything else evolves, from solo contributions to the amazing chorus on “Refuge in Breathing.” Perhaps most amazing of all is that the album ends up being a circuitous cadence, ending a fifth away from the tonal center that began it. Better even than this long-form coherence is the journey, impossible and maybe even undesirable to describe. Rich’s meditative environments do not advise us to wrap troubles in dreams, nor does he offer one-dimensional hope of the sun coming out tomorrow. His is music of acceptance and confrontation in quiet symbiosis, a place of refuge that harnesses rather than excludes other energies, channeling them toward healing. If Morning Fog is not the overtly cinematic experience Rich often provides, every dissonance in the music’s glacial evolution does offer, ultimately, the respite of resolution.





Tracklist:
01 - Distant Traveler
02 - Cantus for Hospitality
03 - Oneiric Cocoon
04 - Awake When Shadows Walk
05 - Refuge in Breathing
06 - Fall Up, the Clouds Will Catch You


Media Report:
Genre: ambient
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits