Robert Rich
Bay Area ambient pioneer Robert Rich began building his own synthesizer at the age of 13, around the same time he became interested in avant-garde and minimal composition. By the time he got to college at Stanford (around 1981), he began organizing “sleep concerts,” playing abstract drones and soundscapes to influence audiences’ REM cycles.
In his 2014 Red Bull Music Academy lecture, he discussed music as ritual, modular synths, mastering advice, magic, sampling tree frogs, and psytrance raves, among many other things.
Hosted by Todd L. Burns I wanted to say hello to one of my musical heroes, and to the lecture couch at the
Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo. His name is Robert Rich. And we were
listening to some of his stuff just now. That was “Perpetual”? Robert Rich Yep. It’s an eight-hour piece that’s based on the sleep concerts, like the one
I’ll be playing tonight. Todd L. Burns Tell us about these sleep concerts, ’cause we’re going to have some ambient bed
music for the entire talk. Robert Rich Well, the sleep concert started, first one was when I was a freshman in
college around 1982. It was in January, and I had been trying for at least a
year or so to figure out how to define a musical direction for what interested
me in my musical voice, my direction. The things that interested me were how
music could be used as a ritual device or a shamanic community-building tool.
Thinking about the ways that music might’ve started archaeologically, and in
the earliest memories of human consciousness as language was taking shape in
our brains, it’s most likely that forms of communication were coming out in
ways with early musical forms as well as with words. In Paleolithic sites,
there’s instruments that include stones that were obviously hit and tuned.
There’s bone pipes with holes in them that are hollow. One of the oldest human
musical instruments is from the bone of an ostrich. It’s a flute that goes
back about 30,000 years. 30,000 years! Which is about when Cro-Magnon
man was probably intermating with Neanderthals in Europe. Todd L. Burns So we’re really starting from the beginning here? Robert Rich [laughs]Yes, yes. My question then was, “How do I define what my purpose is
as a musician?” I was 18-years-old, intellectually inclined in college,
wanting to change the world, wanting to do something with my life. And although I
never went to art school, what I always thought should happen in art school is
that people should be encouraged to define their purpose. As that soon as a
direction has a clear reason, it has the “why,” then the “how” follows. I was
looking for the “why.” After thinking about what other people had been doing
with duration, with ritual, with trance, and repetition and long form of
music, I thought that, there was this idea that came to me that I could play
all night long and invite people to come and bring a pillow, sleeping bag and
encourage them to dream with the music. Todd L. Burns Why sleep, though? Obviously, most performers want people to very actively
hear the music. Robert Rich That’s a really good question, and there’s probably layers to that. I think one
ironic or self-defeating part of it might have been that I was inclined
towards very slow, deep music and film and everything. My favorite art was
minimal and sparse. I can talk later about why I think that’s important. But a lot
of other people would find it boring. I would find that the boredom factor was
one of the distinguishing things of what made me interested in something. What
made other people not like it. And so I thought, “Well, how do I get people to
be in the same place for a long period of time without expectation of
surprise? Without expectation of entertainment so that they could start
looking inside of themselves and find what’s interesting inside.” I think for
me the realization was that that differentiation between boredom and
entertainment was that I always had a whole world of things to explore. And when a
stimulus was very rarefied, I would explode with ideas; other people would
just get really bored and go off and want more stimulus. The sleep idea wasn’t
so much that I wanted them to be asleep to my music. In fact, you don’t sleep
as deeply in a sleep concert. You sleep rather poorly. There’s many reasons
for that. One is that physiology becomes activated, and just your own
heartbeat, your breath speeds up when other people are in the room with you.
When you’re alone, you tend to relax. That causes you to sleep less well as
well. The other thing was simply to get people to be in the same place for a
very long period of time so that they could start experiencing what music can
do over a very long period. Because I have a short attention span, I wander
around. I can’t sit still for more than about 20 minutes. This was a way to
just give people permission to not concentrate, to give people permission to
doze off, and to see if I could create a context for something magical or
something communal. Todd L. Burns When you first did it, was it what you expected? Did you get exactly the sort
of, “Oh, this is exactly what I thought this was going to be?” Or were there
surprises? Robert Rich The very first one was… Hard to say what I knew to expect, it was a total
experiment. It was in the lounge of my college dormitory. It was about this
big and it had a natty carpet and an old piano in it. About 12 or 16 people
showed up. I knew about half of them. I was amazed that there were at least
eight or nine people that I didn’t know there. And, it was free. And it had a thick
atmosphere and that was what I was looking for. What I couldn’t know, and what
I still don’t know entirely, was what the audience was experiencing, and that’s
the mystery of consciousness, isn’t it? The fact that we don’t really know
what each other thinks or experiences. And so, for me, that has been one of the most
interesting puzzles, because my experience of giving a sleep concert is
probably very different from the experience of the people experiencing it. Todd L. Burns I mean, obviously the very obvious, you’re working and they’re not, so to
speak. Robert Rich Yes. Exactly, yeah. Todd L. Burns What is it like for you specifically doing the sleep concert? Robert Rich Usually, there’s a point for the first 40 minutes or so, it’s fairly active.
I’m just performing and I’m playing and listening to notes. Then there’s a
certain point where it gets very, very slow and quiet. The room gets thick and
the atmosphere gets sort of heavy. Then it’s interesting because I go into a place
where I’m riding this very slow wave of energy, but then at a certain point, I
get tired and I get bored as well. So there’s things where I’m trying to keep
a continuum, a thread going, so that the experiences is fluid. Yet, I need to
maintain a sort of level of concentration that becomes difficult for me
especially when I’m tired. Often, it means getting up, going into the back,
grabbing a tea. Going to the bathroom, coming and going more often. And then
there’s periods of magic and concentration, and then periods where I’m just
trying to keep it going. It’s the very frank and honest answer to it. Todd L. Burns What type of gear are you bringing to these things? I know you play, obviously
you’re using synths. You also, in the past, have played flute as well? Robert Rich I have all those things here. Lap steel guitar with loopers and homemade
flutes that are using PVC pipe, basically sprinkler pipe. Then a laptop
running Ableton Live like everybody else in the world. [laughs] I have a
funny story about Ableton with that but that was it to... Todd L. Burns What is that story? Robert Rich We were at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. This is about 2008, I think.
And Robert Henke, who is the person who created Ableton, he conceptualized it. He
doesn’t work for the company anymore, but it was his brainchild. He goes under
the name Monolake as his music. We were backstage while, I think, Juan Atkins
was playing. We were just noticing that Ableton was everywhere. Everybody had
a Mac laptop running the same software at Detroit Electronic Music. Robert was
feeling a little smug, and he puts his legs up and he goes, [strong German
accent] “I think we have achieved 100% market saturation.” [laughter] “You
know, this is not a very good thing. Where do you go?” [laughs] But it comes
in really handy because what I can do then is create this long evolving
textures that are 40 minutes, an hour long. I have them all as essentially,
full-length files, and I mix them in and out in my play. I have access to
hundreds of layers. I could probably give a concert for two days if I could
pull it off. The idea is that it allows me a turntable or DJ setup with two
dozen CD players, essentially. Todd L. Burns With the playing of live instruments, do you hold that back for 30 or 40
minutes while people are sleeping, or do you go directly into that? Robert Rich No, it comes and goes in waves. Usually, the first hour is more active, and there’s... One
of the big influences in my music is Indian classical music, raga. Especially
the beginning part of a raga, the alap. Although I’m not a formal student of
Indian music, I’ve been around it a good part of my life in the Bay Area; San
Francisco area has the Ali Akbar School of Music in the North, and a large
South Indian population where I live in Silicon Valley. I have this wonderful
access to the music of carnatic South Indian music and the Hindustani, North
Indian Classical. That quality of drone and solo instrument and the way that
modes are used in Indian music is a strong influence. I used that as a way to
slowly weave a line of thought into the clouds of sounds that then take over.
The flute and the guitar become like a voice. It’s just very slow. Todd L. Burns You grew up in San Francisco as well? Robert Rich South of there, yeah. Todd L. Burns Tell me, this is quite heady stuff for someone just entering college to be
grappling with these questions already that you were just talking about
earlier. How did we get there? How did you get to that place where you’re
already thinking about these things? Robert Rich Well, someone in my age group was a little kid during the ‘60s and that was a
big factor. I didn’t even know that it was at the time. I didn’t know what
psychedelic meant when I was five. It turned out the Grateful Dead we’re
practicing in a garage behind a cemetery where I was backing. They were about
200 meters from my backyard was the garage where the Grateful Dead were
practicing, when they were called the Warlocks. And Ken Kesey’s bus was parked
two blocks up the hill on Perry Street. There were riots going on at Stanford
University in 1968. As a five-year-old, I’d ride my bike over there and really
enjoy seeing all the naked hippies hanging around Lake Lagunita. First time, I
saw naked adults cavorting. It was, of course, who’s not going to like that? Todd L. Burns I guess when that’s normal this is... Robert Rich [laughs] For me, it was very pleasant. One of the nice things about the San
Francisco Bay Area is a lot of diversity, and a lot of openness to all types
and all sorts of ideas. One of the things that really started shaping my
musical language was a radio station called KPFA in Berkeley. That’s a
listener-sponsored, very left-leaning free radio. During the ‘70s, the music
director was a fellow named Charles Amirkhanian who himself is a respected
sound poet. He was bringing all sorts of amazing composers around and exposing
people to this new world of
minimalism and tonal of avant-garde music. Todd L. Burns When you say “tonal avant-garde,” what is that mean exactly? Robert Rich To distinguish it from people like Milton Babbitt or
Stockhausen which is more event-based and much more intellectual and more
mathematical. People like La Monte Young, or Terry Riley, or Pauline Oliveros,
Annea Lockwood were doing this magical slow, focused... Deep listening was the
phrase that Pauline Oliveros coined. And this idea, that comes from minimalist art,
that art doesn’t have to be about the artist’s ego or the statement of
changing the shape of art. Art can be about changing the shape of the person
experiencing the art. It can be pointing away from the art itself and pointing
back towards the experiencer. The beauty to me about minimalism was it’s not
about repetition. I don’t use this phrase the way most musicians think of it
in terms of Steve Reich or Philip Glass, or Terry Riley, this ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Minimalism in the sense of an
artistic aesthetic of quietude and creating an evanescent, vague experience
which disappears when you try to touch it. What that does when you confront
this art, you confront yourself and the art points back to you like a mirror.
That idea was very, very strong for me. I think with the kinds of composers
that Amirkhanian was bringing, people like Terry Riley who was just a huge
light and a beautiful energy of a person, I mean, he’s just this big-hearted
guy, and his music shows that. It shows this love and ecstatic of feeling for
the universe. I think when I refer to minimalism, I talk first about the
movement which would be a return to tonality. Then the other half of it is art
that points back to the listener. The return to tonality is very interesting
because I also was moved by that to explore microtonal composition. That was
also an influence from Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and all sorts of other, you know... Harry Partch was an American composer who was born in 1902 and
died in 1974. He created a whole tuning system of 43 notes per octave and
built all of his own instruments and created these events that were like
Chinese opera mixed with Greek drama, with this crazy music. He was a complete
outsider, but his music was hyper tonal, even though it was extremely
threatening to people. Very, very strange music. The idea of finding new
language within chords and within melody and not rejecting the way that
emotion can be brought forth into music. That art music doesn’t have to be
cold, it can be beautiful. Even that creating art that has gravitas or has
importance doesn’t mean it has to be intellectual or fully austere or dealing
with only the shadows of the world. It can also encompass these elements of
life and light. Todd L. Burns It can also encompass life because I think... Robert Rich Whoa! And life encompasses death, doesn’t it? Todd L. Burns Of course. Robert Rich [laughs] It’s a full circle. Yeah, and so that aspect of being complete is
very interesting to me. Todd L. Burns One of the other things that you said in the past that’s been an influence on
you is just sounds in general, growing up, frogs, the sound of frogs, or
crickets, or the wind. Robert Rich Absolutely. And I think I’ve said it many times, the frogs taught me
polyrhythms. The way I hear syncopation is from the western tree frogs what we
call the spring peepers. There is an aspect of my music which is a desire to
return to a kind of Eden. It’s a metaphor for me, which is not an Eden in the
bible or Eden in a garden, it’s a metaphor of Eden to a place of connection
within the self. But nature for me is definitely an aspect of the way I hear sound
and the way I hear music. I should probably back up a step and say I grew up
in a household with my father was a jazz guitarist and so, he was into the West Coast
cool school like Stan Getz and Barney Kessel. I grew up hearing that music as
being Caucasian. Coming around the ‘60s, and for me it was all about Sun Ra
and Chicago Art Ensemble and much more aggressive kind of weird stuff, Ornette
Coleman. But my grandparents had this place that they had built a little house
on a property with a creek running through it back in the 1920s. My
grandparents passed away in the 1960s. Sometime around 1977, we moved to my
grandparent’s place to take over the property and I was helping to keep the
garden up and things. And that’s where I really found my language in the garden
there. It’s very emotional for me, actually, because truly, my first
recordings were at the creek that went around a big oak tree. And that recording
ended up being the base of a piece that is on my first album called, “Oak
Spirits.” It was quite literally an improvisation on modular synthesizer and a
creek. [laughs] I was trying to find a way to use the sound of nature to be
its own instrument, not to be an accompaniment to something that was like,
well, what became a horrible cliché with this godawful relaxation music that
was happening in the ‘80s.” Todd L. Burns It’s quite interesting that you always draw that distinction because I think a
lot of people listening to some of the things that you do could very easily
just lump it in there. Robert Rich Absolutely. Todd L. Burns You’re always very adamant that that’s the other stuff. Robert Rich I am. I think if you hear it, you hear it. You just know what I mean. For one
thing is avoiding that cloying triadic harmony that just sounds like you’re
imposing something upon the... Todd L. Burns “You will relax.” Robert Rich Yeah, oh god! It’s a funny thing. The fact that I would be using a vocabulary
which is just inches away from something that turns my teeth on edge is
ironic, isn’t it? For me, because the animals and the world around us has
taught me how to listen to sound. I like to play duets with them yet it’s part
of a language of trying to create a landscape, a surrealist landscape, that
becomes dreamlike. Part of that is to use the nature sounds, manipulating
them into a place where they become psychological, not photographic. Todd L. Burns Is there something we should play that maybe exemplifies that pretty well from
what you have here? Robert Rich Sure. Actually, if... Let’s see. Could in fact play... Do you have “Sunyata” on
there? Todd L. Burns Yeah. We do. Robert Rich Cool. Todd L. Burns “Oak Spirits,” I mean, why not? Robert Rich Instead of that, do you have Trances/Drones in there? Play “Sunyata
(Emptiness),” if you have Trances/Drones. OK, this is actually on my first
album and it’s layers of flute, my voice and the frogs in the rain, basically.
It’ll take a while to build up because my music was very patient back then. Todd L. Burns Yeah. This track is 23 minutes long so we may be here a while. [laughter] Robert Rich We could get a little more gain out of this? Thanks. (music: Robert Rich – “Sunyata (Emptiness)”) [comments] So perhaps people start to understand why I’m distinguishing it
from the Brahms “Lullaby” with bird songs behind him. Todd L. Burns Another distinction that you constantly make is it’s not ambient. It’s deep
listening. Sorry, a phrase that you like to describe what you do. Robert Rich I’m way more comfortable with ambient than the word that sounds like sewage,
yeah. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there was really no way of putting what
myself and other people in my little clique of friends that we’re doing stuff
like this. Most of us are starting really solitary, this was after the German
krautrock space music scene in the ‘70s. There really wasn’t any place for
this kind of thing in the ‘80s. Most of us were working as hermits. As far as
terminology goes, I’ve always liked Pauline’s approach with the word “deep
listening.” Todd L. Burns That’s Pauline Oliveros. Robert Rich Pauline Oliveros, yeah. It refers to the listener, not to the sound. It’s
almost a set of instructions saying, “Here’s how you can approach this. Here’s
how you can get some nutrition out of it.” As opposed to saying, “Here’s what
it resembles.” It avoids that problem that, for example, electronic dance
music has run into, which is having to come up with a different subgenre every
time somebody changes the BPM by five points. [laughter] “Oh, this is jungle.“ “No, it’s
not. It’s gabber.” “This is psytrance.” “No, it’s dubstep.” Somebody changes
the kick drum sample they use and they have to come up with a different term
for it. It’s ridiculous. I think that the point of finding names for styles is
degenerate, and it’s really a kind of way of not evaluating what the music is on
its own. But the difficulty in trying to sell your music or to convey to people
that they might be interested in it usually involves language at some level or
another, even though the music itself might be trying to completely subjugate
language or subvert language. Todd L. Burns One of the things that you just mentioned is that all of these people were
working as hermits. There didn’t seem to be a community, but there was a radio
show called Hearts of Space. That was a community in a way of these things. Robert Rich It was one guy, Steven Hill. Todd L. Burns Can you talk about what that is and how that played a role in your career? Robert Rich Yeah. Steven was another Bay Area installation. He came to the San Francisco
Bay Area in 1972, I think, right out of architecture school in Pennsylvania
and landed right in the post-hippie scene in San Francisco and started a radio
show on KPFA. That same station, which I grew up listening to. He started in
the ‘70s, he was on Thursday nights from eleven ‘till midnight. Actually, no,
he was about three hours. It was like from ten until midnight or something.
Then he moved it to Sunday night, which was a really good spot. Back in the
‘70s, it would be Klaus Schulze, Popul Vuh, classical Indian music, Paul Horn
Inside the Pyramid, Terry Riley and everything in between. When [Brian] Eno started
doing Ambient 1 and 2 and all of those things, that was staple. Todd L. Burns There was nothing else like this on the radio. Robert Rich There really wasn’t, not in California, that’s for sure. And there were only a
couple of shows... There was Forest’s show Musical Starstreams that was playing
more rock-oriented electronic music which is more on that Tangerine Dream
school of sequencers and things. What Steven was calling space music, which
really, I think refers better to inner space rather than cosmic outer space, it also would crossover into what was an honest new age culture at the time
which I didn’t have anything to do with being a 17-year-old punk industrial
influenced experimentally minded weirdo; I thought that this new-age scene was
at least honest. It had a kind of post-hippie veracity to it. But I couldn’t stand
the frilly rainbows and unicorns, and crystal stuff. Yet, some of the music
that was coming out of that like
Iasos, for example, although it was calling itself interdimensional
music from some culture or another, it was often really pretty good in its own
way. This was before new-age became really more of a new word for easy
listening when we started getting the John Tesh’s and things like that, which
is when we all started really trying to distance ourselves as far as we could
from those labels. There wasn’t a bin in the record store at the time for
this; you’d go to the rock section to find Tangerine Dream, but you’d go to
the classical section to find Terry Riley. It didn’t really make much sense,
and it never has to this day. I think that it’s always been a music in the
fringes. It tends to be, like most introverted art forms, tends not to be a
dominant paradigm. I think that what you’re saying, to get back to your
question about hermits; a lovely quote of Daevid Allen from Gong has a poem
where he quotes, “We are a community of hermits.” [laughs] We got to know
Steven Hill because he was the only person playing our music. We didn’t know
each other. These are people like Michael Sterns, Steve Roach, Jeff Greinke
became a good friend of mine. He was a bit more on the art side of things.
Some of the folks in Germany, Parsons, I forgot his first name, he’s in New
Zealand, actually. Anyway, the point being that we didn’t know each other but
the fact that there was this one DJ willing to play this kind of music, he put
us in touch with each other. I was doing a sound installation in Los Angeles
in 1985 for a Somerset Maugham play. He said, “Oh, while you’re down there,
you should meet this guy, Steve Roach.” I’d never heard of Steven Roach except
maybe a few pieces of his on Steven’s show. So Steve Roach and I got together for
lunch and we found we had all sorts of things in common. We both had pet
iguanas and we were Hawkwind fans. That was good enough for us. [laughs] Todd L. Burns I need to explore that iguana connection a little bit further. At a certain
point with the radio show, he started a record label and you were one of the,
I guess, first five or six releases on it. Robert Rich Yeah. 1989, he put out my album Rainforest. He had been playing my other
albums which had been coming out in Europe at the time, in Sweden and France.
He didn’t feel any of them were commercial enough for him. He was trying to
make money, [laughs] which I can understand. I would send him the stuff as I was working
on it. This album in ’88, I had finished called Rainforest. He said, “I
would love to release this if you’re interested.” And it turned out to be one of
his bestselling albums at that time, and certainly, my bestselling album of
all times, before or since. Todd L. Burns Why do you think that one resonated in particular or was it just the
marketing? Robert Rich Well, boy, it was a perfect storm. I think, because I was in a state of extreme
depression about the state of the planet. I sometimes go into these big funks
about fact that we’re destroying ourselves very quickly. I mean, the planet
will be fine once it gets rid of us but it’s our own species that are doing a
pretty good job of it right now. It was that concern about deforestation and
truly, I was donating some of the sales to the rainforest action network, just
trying to fix some things in Brazil and in Borneo. Maybe that hit a little bit
of a wave of interest but I think there was also that tiny, little moment
where independent labels could still get shelve space without having to pay
for it. When there was a cross-marketing that could work without having to put
names on music where the new age audience could find it and the space music
audience could find it. The old people listening to German krautrock could
find it. The whole thing, it crossed over the different markets accidentally.
They did a good job of taking advantage of it. Todd L. Burns Just a couple of minutes ago, you talked about how you were a punk and weirdo.
I think a lot of people don’t really recognize that some of your influences
include people like Throbbing Gristle and Hafler Trio and these things, can
you talk a little bit about how that connects to your work and how you mind
people to hear it maybe in the attitude? Robert Rich I never was much of a punk. I didn’t really like the aggressive stance of the
macho stance of guitar chords and that sort of thing. But I was playing in noisy
improv groups, and some of the folks in those groups went on to do other
interesting things. I was usually the guy playing the modular synthesizer
making weird noises that made it all very strange. They did name me “The
Professor.” I was 15 or 16 at that time doing that around 1979-1980, 17 I
guess in 1980. Yeah, the influence of Throbbing Gristle was twofold, I think.
One was the idea that you didn’t have to wait for anybody to tell you
that you’re any good. You don’t need record labels. You can start your own,
just do it, and that was their thing. The whole industrial movement also like
Cabaret Voltaire and Wire and all of those guys that were big influences on
me. Part of it was the attitude of DIY and nobody has to tell you that you’re
good or that you know how to play music. If you have something to say, say it.
The other thing I liked about Throbbing Gristle was that they talked about how
music was energy, how music was a form of magic, and how with intention, you
could direct the energy of music towards a purpose. And music is energy; it is a
substance, it actually is a force, that changes things. And that is a shamanic
idea; the idea that the intangible can change things. This is the essence of
human creativity, isn’t it? When you think an idea for the first time, you’ve
done something that the universe has never done before. You’ve actually
created a new combination of words, a new combination of shapes. And that is
miraculous. When you make something, when you make a sculpture, you have added
something physical into the world, into the universe that didn’t exist. That
is an act of creation. That’s an act of birth. That idea that Throbbing
Gristle was dealing with about music as energy, music as ritual, was very, very
powerful. I think during the ‘80s, the industrial movement became co-opted as
a kind of dance music with Skinny Puppy where SPK started going and things
like that. The more what people think of now is the sort of Nine Inch Nails
sound. Back in the late ‘70s, it was pure experimental scary weirdness. That
interested me. So I think my personality wasn’t so inclined towards the
underbelly, the ugly underbelly of industrial, which was the celebration of
only the shadows of human existence. Or if not the celebration, at least the
focusing of spotlight upon them. I think my nature is generally one of much
more introverted, little bit more shy, and a bit more positive. And so, to take those
ideas of music as a form of magic, and to take that idea of shamanic ritual and
to use it for community-building, and maybe that’s the old hippie in me coming
out. It’s a weird hybrid. Todd L. Burns Community and community-building seems to be a major topic for you. Why is
that? Is it like the Bay Area that’s coming through there, somehow? Robert Rich Well not just the Bay Area, because we have communities all over the world, don’t
we? There’s a community of art music and a community of experimental thinking
which is a web that covers the world with nodes sprinkled everywhere. And we
become a worldwide, a global community. But also a real physical community and
the people next to you, the people in this building right now. I’ve realized
over the years that as our culture is increasingly virtualized, and that more
and more people are experiencing their whole life in front of a little four-
inch screen, that we’re losing something very fundamental about human
existence. That as that shifts, which I’m seeing accelerated where I live in
Silicon Valley, I mean, Google is located walking distance from my house... Todd L. Burns You’re literally seeing it firsthand. Robert Rich We are literally seeing it. And I’m literally seeing people becoming hermits
surrounded by people. I mean, it’s the idea of being isolated in a world
that... I ran out of words. I get frustrated, because really people are
shutting themselves off from real experience to have a very delineated and
filtered experience. A much smaller experience in this two-dimensional space.
Whereas, this is real. We can buy somebody a coffee, buy somebody a tea, go
for a walk. The physicality of human existence is something that as we deny
further and further, we allow ourselves to further destroy our planet and our
environment because we become we less aware of the destruction we’re doing. And I
think that as we build an awareness, for example, of the food we eat, if we
eat more local food, if we eat healthier-raised food, we help the actual
planet that we’re living on, and the people who are growing that food. And we
create joy with the people we cook with, with the people we dine with. And that
joy is part of this artistic experience that we are interested in as artist or
as musicians. And so, continuity for me between making art that’s lasting and
powerful and transformative, and trying to live a life that is continuous with
that, contiguous and complementary, so that the actions of growing my own food
in my backyard instead of having some stupid lawn, which we do, we put in
raised beds and drip irrigation and we raise lettuce and carrots, and broccoli
and tomatoes, and we end up giving a lot of food to our neighbors [laughs] because we have
too much. [laughs] That to me is not different from giving a concert for 30
or 40 sleeping people or making an album or mastering somebody else’s album. I
do mastering, and I teach a college class in mastering. That aspect of teaching
and giving back now has been also part of that continuity and part of that
community. I really, really want to point out the importance of non-virtual;
being in this place now, not taking a picture of it. Everybody goes out to
dine and they want to take a picture of their food. Just talk to the person
you’re with. [laughs] Remember the food. Remember the flavor of it. When I
was driving in from the airport into Tokyo. This is the first I’ve been to
Tokyo. My driver who is working for Red Bull said, “I’m surprised you’re not
taking pictures. Everybody else I drive over this bridge is taking pictures.”
I said, “No, it’s beautiful right now.” It’s moving me. The lights are
scintillating in my heart. It’s gorgeous. If I’m taking a picture. I’m just
seeing it through this little stupid lens and then I’ll have a file on my
computer that I’m never going to look at. At least now, I’m experiencing
something for real and it’s changing me. That’s kind of what I mean. Todd L. Burns How do you square all of these electronic music that you’re making. All these
technology that you’re using with these ideas of trying to push back against
it? Robert Rich Well, there’s a certain amount of irony because music is non-tangible, isn’t
it? It is virtual experience to a certain extent. As far as electronics,
they’re just instruments. I play flutes and I play percussion and piano and
guitars. It’s just another instrument. The electronicness of it is only a way
to transform sound, because I want the sound to be energetic and I want it to
be surreal. I want it to be something that triggers a memory. The way to do
that is just transform sounds into things that resemble something from a dream
or resemble something you’ve never heard before or music from an alien
species. And the way to do that is to warp, and bend, and twist, and manipulate. Todd L. Burns I want to talk about some of the collaborations you’ve done over the years.
You’ve collaborated with a lot of people. One, I guess maybe unlikely one is
Lustmord. You did something in 1995, I think it was? Robert Rich Yeah, Stalker. Todd L. Burns He comes from this UK Throbbing Gristle-type background. Robert Rich Just like his old friends of Chris and
Cosey. Todd L. Burns How did you guys meet up, and how did that collaboration happen, because it
seems like an unlikely partnership? Robert Rich Yeah. It’s very silly. I did an interview with a magazine around 1993. They
asked me one question which is what sorts of music do you enjoy that isn’t
like the kind you make? I said, “Well, lately, I’ve been enjoying stuff that
Hafler Trio’s done and Zoviet France.” They had just come out with an album
called Shouting At The Ground, which I thought was pretty brilliant. I
mentioned Lustmord’s Heresy was pretty good. I really enjoyed that one and a
couple of other things I mentioned that was in that territory of noise music
or more dark ambient, I guess, is the term now. About six months or eight
months later, it comes out in the magazine and I get a phone call with a funny
Welshman’s accent and he says, “Hi, you probably don’t know me but this is
Brian Williams, and I go with the name Lustmord. I saw you mention me in this
article. I got your phone number. I’m quite flattered. I like your music too.”
It’s like, “Really?” [laughs] I’d never expected that he would’ve been listening to new
age music. We found a huge common ground because we’re both audiophiles. We
both love big, deep, engulfing sound and we had fondness for a lot of similar
approaches to sound. It’s not as odd of match as you would think. He’s also
just a very nice person to be around. I mean, he’s not brooding and dark, and
gothy like you’d think from the music. Todd L. Burns You said you’re both big audiophiles and you also mentioned mastery and
engineering. How did you get into that aspect of things? Robert Rich Well, as being a control freak, if anybody here who’s... I try to be nice
about it but I got... I’m super-organized. A little bit nerdy about my sound
and my set-up and when I tour I am my own sound engineer. I’ve just always
been a perfectionist that way, it’s my personality. And so, when I started
releasing albums on Hearts of Space [Records], it was the first time I ever had access
to the idea that this stuff was going to have a decent mastering engineer. And I
wanted to be there because I wanted to learn everything that was going on, but
I also wanted to make sure he didn’t screw up, because I want control! [laughs] So the
person who is doing all the mastering for Hearts of Space was a fellow named
Bob Ohlsson. Bob had worked at Motown for the ten years they were in Detroit.
He had engineered the first Stevie Wonder albums and Marvin Gaye and all sorts
of famous Motown albums. When Motown left Detroit and moved to Los Angeles, he
came out to San Francisco and became very good friends with Steven Hill back
in the ‘70s and was the mastering engineer for all of the Hearts of Space
albums. Bob and I got along like wildfire. I mean, I basically was always
sitting in with mastering sessions asking questions, telling him what I
wanted, [laughs] and he became my mentor, as it were. I was very lucky to have somebody
who really had the old school history of recording in his soul. Todd L. Burns What were the particular things that you were very focused on making sure it
sounded right? Robert Rich I wanted to make sure that things weren’t too loud or too bright. That the
fades were really slow. I mean, I was just meticulous. There was a certain
sound I wanted that you could describe as being more brown. I didn’t want it
to be yellow. I wanted it to be sepia and warm, and slightly... Not veiled, because
I wanted the scintillating top end, but I was composing with tonalities that
were filling out frequency spaces that I wanted to be very specific. He
completely respected that. When he left for Nashville in the late ‘90s, I
ended up taking over his mastering work for Hearts of Space. By that time, by
around 1995, people were coming to me to ask me to work on their albums. Jeff
Greinke had me remastered his old releases. A Produce who’s now passed away,
Barry Craig, I’ve mastered most of his albums. Then started going into a lot
of the ethereal, goth project stuff, [such as the group] Love Spirals Downwards, so it wasn’t just
ambient at this point now. It’s been a lot of styles and music. Todd L. Burns What are the things that you see like young musicians doing quote-unquote wrong, that
you’re helping out in the mastering process? Is there anything that you continually see that they can learn? Robert Rich Well, as a mastering engineer, the thing that I’m always going on and on about
is not to fight the loudness wars. There’s no winning that war. It’s like a
nuclear arms race. Step off the rail on that one. Just get off the stairs
because loudness doesn’t make it better. Loudness comes from the big thing
that says volume on your amplifier. Resolution goes downwards into silence.
It’s quiet. The stuff sounds better because of dynamic range and the listeners
who decide how loud it gets. The loudness thing is one thing, especially with
electronic dance music. Things are so smashed. Man, have you heard some of the
Skrillex albums? They’re unlistenable. There was less dynamic range than full
on white noise. Yeah, that’s the first thing. But also to leave space for the
different frequencies. To allow your production to stretch into experiential
realms so you say, “I’m going to choose this instrument because it does
something in this frequency range.” That’s part of orchestration. That’s what
old-school orchestration is. You get the horns to do something here because
you want that frequency range to fill in a certain experience. I love deep
low-end, but you don’t want it to be there all the time. You want to show
people you have it and then take it away, and then show them you have it again, so
that the speakers aren’t always working, but when they give it to you, they’ll
really give it to you. That way, there’s dynamic range and that low-end can
really speak. All that kind of stuff. But even more important, I think, from a
production and creation side of it, is to break out of structures. A lot of
the software and the tools suggest ways of working like keeping your tempo the
same all the time. Keeping everything in bar lines, blocking out your stuff
into verse and chorus, and bridge, and different kinds of block structures.
That’s artificial. Musicians don’t think that way. If somebody’s going to take
a solo for an extra bridge and a half, you can bend with it. You can make the
music so much more fluid and poetic by not letting the software dictate your
decisions. So much electronic music, and even now, acoustic and electric pop
music is built in block structures. It’s like Lego. It’s so predictable, and
it’s really, really boring. Go back and listen to some supposedly very
predictable songs from a pop group like Crowded House. You’ll find that
they’ll have a verse that’s only three lines long and then they’ll suddenly
jump into a totally different part of the song. It’s surprising, and it’s fun, and it’s much more organic. That comes from writing with people and being human
about your ideas and not letting the software impose structure. That’s a few
suggestions. Todd L. Burns One of the things you talked about in the past also I find quite interesting
is that you actually don’t know a ton of instruments; that limitation is
really helpful for you. You’re obviously someone who’s really into gear in a
way. Robert Rich Less than you’d think, but yeah, to a certain extent. Todd L. Burns But not, in a way. You’re not into gear because its infinite possibility is
actually quite terrible. Robert Rich Limitation is the best thing you could possibly have in your creative life.
Endless choices is self-destruction. Just remember that and you’ll be fine. [laughter]
Really, really, really put things away. Don’t look at them. Pick one or two
things and make an album with it. It’s so much easier. But yeah, I feel like I’m
faking it almost all the time. Every time, I try to... Todd L. Burns Really? Robert Rich Really. Todd L. Burns Why? Robert Rich Because I’m not a musician, I can barely... I can’t read music, I can’t write music, I can’t
play anybody else’s music. If somebody wants me to sit in for a 12-bar blues
jam, I’ll play drums because I don’t know what to do. I think it’s supposed to
go down here now but it’s really from the very beginning, I started out as
with the intention of being a sound artist. I thought that it was just going
to be like installations and sculpture and performance art or something.
Suddenly, I had to figure out what a chord was and what a minor key, or a
mode, or what’s a diminished? It’s all self-taught. You could put me around
some real musicians and I really shut up. [laughs] I’m not kidding. I’m faking it. Todd L. Burns In the past though, you have been making samples, I guess, for libraries and
other things to do with technology. Robert Rich Yeah. I mean, that’s, it’s a good income. I mean, part of it is that one of my rules
for my own music, and this is related to that previous question, was instead of
using sample libraries, I make all of my own sounds. I only have a few sounds,
but I made them all. It gives my music a specific sound. It sounds like me. I
don’t need to sound like everybody else. I don’t care if I have the best cello
sample in the world. If I want a cello, I’ll hire a cellist. I want the sound
to be something that I did because it’s real. And so, after years of doing that,
people I knew... I happen to know a lot of folks that were in synthesizer
companies back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s at Sequential Circuits and
E-mu.They knew I could do this and they started coming to me asking for
samples. So back in the early ‘80s, I did a bunch of sound design for the
Prophet-5 presets, and then the E-mu Proteus modules... They knew I had a bunch of weird
ethnic instruments, udu drums and things with rubber bands and things, and they
asked me if I could do a sample library for what became the Proteus 3 World
module back in... Wow, long time ago now, 1993? Todd L. Burns This was through Rick? Robert Rich Rick Davies was a very good friend at Sequential Circuits. I didn’t know you
knew that. You did your research. [laughs] Todd L. Burns And we had Dave Smith here
actually earlier this week. Robert Rich Yeah. I was playing in a band with Rick Davies and Andrew McGowan. Andrew
played bass on Rainforest and he played bass in my group Amoeba. Back in
1982, we were in a group together called Urdu. If you’d see me on stage
singing and looping in Urdu, you would worry for my sanity, really. I think
people thought I was psychotic. It might be just a little bit. I don’t know.
[laughs] Yeah, Andrew and his wife Joan, basically became the entire front
office for Dave Smith’s instruments. I knew Dave back when I was 16-year-old
hanging around with his employees at Sequential Circuits. I got a Prophet 5
that had been a reject that I could keep working barely and that was my
synthesizer. Todd L. Burns These were the early Prophet-5s. Robert Rich Rev 1, yeah. This might be really boring tech talk for you guys but the
Sequential Circuits, their very first product was a sequencer voltage memory,
but then I became friends with a bunch of local guys that were working there.
The company was really loose. It was like 40 people and they were mostly
musicians that barely knew electronics. The Prophet-5, which was the first
polyphonic digital synthesizer, it was analog but a digital control
synthesizer with memory in other words. The Rev 1 was a lemon. It was
basically a prototype that they made 400 of. It was point to point soldering
to fix problems on the circuit board. There was glue on places to keep things
from falling... It was just a wreck. As soon as they could get one that wouldn’t
break when you looked at it, the Rev 2... The Rev 1 by the way, they were
selling for $6,000 in 1978, really a lot of money. Then for a mere $1500, they
got all of those professional musicians who already paid $5,000 or something
to get one that work. Then they took all of the old lemons back in and they
sold them to their employees for $500. And that’s how I got my first decent
synthesizer. Todd L. Burns I mean, those synths were smoking. They were catching on fire. Robert Rich The Rev 1 had problems they called the green caps. If you’ve ever done any
circuitry, there’s something called a shunt capacitor. It goes on the ground
line between the positive and the ground to filter out the DC noise on the
line. Most capacitors when they fail, they fail open. Well, the green caps
unfortunately had a high failure rate and they all failed shorted instead of
opened, which meant smoke. Really, really bad. Power supplies would actually
blow up because you were just basically putting a screw driver across the
rails. [laughs] It’s just really a disaster. And it wasn’t their fault! They
just had a bad bunch of caps. Todd L. Burns So you got the version two? Robert Rich No, I had the Rev 1. Todd L. Burns Oh, you had the version one. Robert Rich My first one was Joe Zawinul’s and it barely worked. It was so bad and so the
next one I had was... oh, shit. What’s his name? Michael Boddicker’s that he
traded in. My first recordings were made, not my very first recordings, but
the Michael Boddicker Prophet-5 Rev 1 was the one I used until I sold it. Todd L. Burns What are you using nowadays to make music? Robert Rich That’s really boring, isn’t it? I mean, it’s just stuff. Stuff changes. I use... I’ll make
samples out of things I record and I’ll mangle them and slow them down and
stretch them out, and do stuff, and make it sound different. I kind of have a reputation
for being a modular synth guy. That’s because a guy who started a modular
synth company in the 1990s was a fan of my music. He said, “Would you like to
write a review of my MOTM modular?” I said, “Sure.” By the way, this is
another life lesson for anybody who’s going to be a professional musician.
Keep doing everything that makes money. Say yes to everything. If anybody
comes to you with an offer to make money, it’s going to be rare. One of the
things I was doing to make money was writing articles for these music
magazines like Electronic Musician and Home Studio Recording and all of those
things back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And I was writing reviews for electronic
musician and he asked the editor if they could have me write the review of his
modular. It was a ploy on his part because he was a fan of mine and he wanted
to meet me, which is no big deal, I’m not elusive. He also wanted me to start
beta-testing his new modules. He basically let me keep the stuff I had after I
did the review. Then lo and behold, with a little dirty look from the editors
of the magazine, two years later, you’d see me at NAMM demoing the darn stuff.
So Paul Schreiber was the guy who built MOTM Modular Synthesis technology.
Well, my wife says I’m his trained monkey. At NAMM shows, I try to make his
modulars sound good so that people will buy them. I’ve worked my way into a
rather large modular system by helping to design some of the modules with
concepts and with... For something called the cloud... I’m sorry. What is it? The
Morphing Terrarium is one of the modules where I designed all of the wave
cycles. It’s a digital wave form oscillator that’s analog-controlled. It has
192 single-cycle wave forms and then I spend a month or two creating all of
the wave forms. You end up with a lot of analog modular stuff. It looks nice.
It blinks and makes weird sounds. And so I get a reputation for that. This is how it
grows. Todd L. Burns What do you like about modular synthesizers so much? Robert Rich I like it that there’s no lines. That there’s no rules. You plug anything at
anything else. It can go squish. It’s like clay, really. I mean, once you get
familiar with... And it’s also my first instrument when I was 13, I started
building modular kits because I wasn’t a rich kid, I made the money for paper
routes and gardening, and babysitting, and things. Todd L. Burns There’s this company called Paya, right? Robert Rich Yeah. That’s the stuff. It was horrible. For $35, you could an oscillator kit.
For $27, you could get a VCA or an envelope. And the stuff barely worked, you
could really not make music with it. In 1976/’77/’78, I would build it like
one kit a month with paper route money. After a year or two, I had a wall
stuff that sounded bad. But it made noise. In fact, you probably... We can do
it. Let’s not talk for a few moments. If you could play Premonitions. Let’s
see. I think it’d be the side two of the first record is a piece called “Low
Sounds.” It’s a collage for low noises or collage for low noise. Jump about
five minutes into this or something. That’s fine. (music: Robert Rich – “Low Sounds”) [comments] This is before I had the Prophet-5. I was 17 when I did this.
This is around 1980. It’s an improvisation live to cassette with home-built
electronics. The Paya was almost incapable of staying in tune. You immediately
give up on the idea of sounding like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream because
I didn’t have $100,000 to buy the giant wall of Moog like they had. You can
hear more the Throbbing Gristle influence too, I guess. I guess I mentioned
this because this is all modular home-built stuff. In some ways, this was my
first instrument aside from piano or voice or something. It’s just a native
language for me. Todd L. Burns I could on for a long time with you but I want to open up the questions. Robert Rich Absolutely. Otherwise, it’ll become a sleep talk, like a sleep concert. Todd L. Burns Does anyone have anything that they would like to ask? Is there a microphone
around? Audience Member Hello, hello. Todd L. Burns Is that... Robert Rich One of ours? Audience Member Hello, hello. Robert Rich Hi. Audience Member I was interested about the conception of magic in the music. For some years,
I’ve been researching a little bit on rituals and stuff. I wanted to ask you
if there’s anything you can share with us, like an accidental magic that could
be good to open the conscience in music, and if there’s anything that you do or you
know that you could share? Robert Rich Let me see if I can try to... This is a difficult thing to talk about. I would say that there’s no rituals
that I perform. There’s nothing I do in particular. I don’t practice any
tradition at all, except perhaps meditation of a sort of Sufi sort. As far as
magic is concerned, what I mean is there is a certain type of concentration
that creates realities. And this is something that artist learn. It works in life
and it’s a very strange thing. What you do is concretize something. You make
it real in your mind. It’s not the same as imagining. It’s not the same as
creating something in front of you. What it is is allowing homunculus to form.
Allowing a golem or a landscape to come and become alive. It starts taking you
over. You allow it in and you say, “OK, it will grow. I will let it there and
I will observe it grow. I will let it become conscious.” It could be described
similarly is psycho-physiological terms, in that we are creating a subroutine
in our brain which becomes this creative force. It’s internal. It doesn’t have
to be all woo-y and magical. It’s a metaphor that we can use that has power
because our minds work with metaphors. We tell this story. The story of the
golem, the medieval rabbi who makes a little boy out of clay and breathes the
word of God into this little pile of clay. It gets up and runs off, and
creates all sorts of mischief. He shouldn’t have breathed the secret word into
it. This is what art is. Just like the story of the golem, like the mistake
that that rabbi made, he did not have humility. To practice this kind of magic we need to take full humility and we need to take full ownership for our
actions. That’s why in my own life, I’ve decided to take a path of more of a
gentle music, and of a non-violent and a more communal-minded, because I own my
actions, because these Golems that I released, these homunculi, they can go off
and do all sorts of damage. I need to impart within them the best energy that
I can but when I create an album, it waits to be created. What happens is I’m
not making it from my ego. I’m waiting until the album forms a thing. And that
thing is real before I even start making sound. Then what I do is I’m working
to create notes that resemble the world that is making itself happen in my
head. I try to approximate the thing so that it can come out into that music.
I’m reciting in other words. I’m taking dictation. But it’s not like Mozart. I
mean, Mozart says that he was writing as fast as he could. He probably was,
because he was insanely inspired for somebody to write that much music in a
short life. It’s harder for me. My form of dictation is experimenting until it
sounds something like what the world is telling me, what the homunculus, what
the golem is saying to me. It’s not like, “No, this album doesn’t sound like
that. This album sounds like this. You need it to be... Wetter. You need it to be
dryer. You need it to be higher, lower.” I go, “Oh, I don’t know what to do. I
don’t know how to do this.” I say I’m a faker, because most of the time, I
don’t know how to write the notes down. I’m just trying to take the dictation.
But the first key is to follow the “Why,” and this is another aspect of magic,
is to know purpose first. If you have purpose, then you have direction. Then
you know the questions to asks and the questions are far more important than
the answers. The answers just come out. Audience Member Perfect. Thank you. Audience Member Hello. Thanks for your lecture. You talked about TGs earlier in your lecture. I
recently saw Psychic TV live in Paris, and Genesis P-Orridge was talking about
trance state in Africa on a recent trip. What’s your point of view about
trances? Is it the state that you want the listener to reach while listening
to your music? Is it to state that you try to reach while making your music?
What’s your point of view about trance in music? Robert Rich I think that music and trance are completely tied in very closely together and
music is the language that grew up, I think, out of ritual and shamanism and
trance. If you look at the way it’s used in many culture still to this day,
you could call it hypnosis if you want to be western or scientific about it.
The roles of drone and repetition are immensely important in these questions.
Just like there are in drugs and exogenous influences of psychic phenomenon, there are endogenous influences of psychic phenomenon that we build ourselves.
We could say that they’re chemical, but there are also many other levels. Just
like drugs can be soporific or enhancing, they can be uppers or downers, let’s
say, so can trances. There are less-productive forms, in my mind – I’m being
judgmental here so excuse the judgmental terminology... My own feelings in my
life have come to the point where I feel that the trances that involve over
stimulation are less useful than the ones that involve rarefied stimulation
which is why my music is so quiet. I think that the things going at psytrance
raves are very interesting and they’re very powerful. But they’re not as
nutritious. What I find is that if you look at the touchstone of the result,
if you measure the person’s life and the person’s utility in life, you’ll find
the whispering forms of trance, that the focal energizing ones create more
enhanced life directions in people. They get more done and they’re more
useful. I’ve seen a lot of burnout cases at psy raves. You see a bunch of
people who can barely form a sentence. Maybe it’s just years of DMT use, but
it’s also, there’s a quality of over-stimulation where they become incapable
of changing the world now. They’ve changed themselves so much that they’re now
just a basket case. In spiritual disciplines, though, they’ll refer to a
center of gravity. You’ll see this in Zen. You’ll see it in Sufism. The silent
forms of meditation or of trance tend to lower your center of gravity. They
make it hard to push you over and I mean psychically as well. The high drama,
high-dynamic-range kinds of trance tend to bring your center of gravity up.
They make it very easy to tip you over. You’ll find that people will land to
things like schizophrenia and stuff like that, where the balance point is set
off-kilter. So I think out of basically becoming an old fart, my own strange,
radical conservatism is that I think that when we change ourselves, we need to
do it with that center of gravity. [laughs] There’s a couple of questions still? Yeah.
Mic is moving its way around. Audience Member Hello. Robert Rich Hi. Audience Member Hi. Thanks to be there. My question is have you been ever influenced by
different artist coming from concrete music like Pierre Henry, for example,
Fluxus movement in contemporary arts, or this artist who actually work a lot
with sounds? Robert Rich Not so much directly, although certainly the history of Pierre Henry and people
like that are extremely essential for the history of recorded music. I would
say that hasn’t directly influenced me. Some of the Fluxus artist have
influenced me more though. My joke about Yoko Ono is, The Beatles destroyed
Yoko. [laughter] She was doing brilliant work before she met John. Actually, Marcel
Duchamp, I think, it would be the spiritual progenitor of the Fluxus. I think
his work is very influential for me. But oddly, there was one Fluxus performer who
influenced the sleep concerts. I haven’t read my own interviews in a while,
I’m forgetting his name. Sometimes, when you’re talking it’s hard to think. He
would put whistles in his mouth and he would sit on a hammock and fall asleep
in front of an audience. His sleeping would cause the whistles to blow back
and forth. [laughs] I thought, “That’s a lazy way to do it. We should at
least get some work.” But yeah, I think that situational art and dada, and
surrealism, and installation art, all of those things are very, very important
for me. Todd L. Burns One thing we didn’t touch on, I guess, was the sculpture, of visual art and
these other things play as big of a role, it seems like. Robert Rich For me, big time. Yeah. It’s huge. I started out thinking I was more of a
visual artist than a sound artist. I used to draw and paint a lot when I was
little. But I was never satisfied because it was too physical, and I wanted to
paint my dreams and to paint my hallucinations because I would have these
vivid living hallucinations. I hated my paintings because they were still,
they weren’t the energy that was in my brain. But what I found was that music
could give me those vibrant hallucinations directly. I felt that it would make
more sense to try to give them to people inside of themselves rather than to
just try to represent what I did. That was more of the activating principle.
Yeah, it definitely came from a visual art thing but in some ways a living
painting, an imaginary painting. Yeah. There’s microphone back there. Move it
over his way. You’re still stranded over here. Audience Member Thank you Mr. Rich for being here. I got a couple of questions, actually.
First one is you grew up in San Francisco next to this Grateful Dead band.
Now, you’re this audiophile, you love working with speakers. Big speakers,
being surrounded by music. I always got this fixation with this character
around the Grateful Dead crew that, everybody calls him the “Bear.” Robert Rich Owsley? Audience Member Yeah, Owsley. Robert Rich They just liked it because he was making the acid. [laughs] [laughter] Audience Member No, no, I know. I know but what I read is that he actually constructed the
speakers. Robert Rich He built some of the first ones but they weren’t as good as history pretends. And
Dan Healy was the sound guy that made them sound good. Owsley built some of
the very first speakers and Dan Healy built some of the amplifiers and also
some of the cabinets. There were several different teams of people within the
rock & roll history that invented the PA system. I mean, really like the
rock & roll soundsystem. The guys who were touring with the early version of
Fleetwood Mac actually, the Peter Green version of Fleetwood Mac also were
some of the very first PA systems ever. Dan Healy and Owsley PAs for the Dead,
also, we mustn’t forget the name which I forgot. Sorry. John, they’re current
but he’s... John Meyer. Since 1980, the Dead were using Meyer Sound, John
Meyer has a major company now. He was doing all their soundsystems throughout
the ‘90s. Yeah. There’s a big team of people with a group like that and with
rock & roll PA systems, you’re dealing with a whole other level of power and
focal point and feedback suppression. I don’t know a thing about that world. Audience Member My second question is about, in Peru, in these Ayahuasca sessions, they got this
beautiful litanies called icaros. I was asking if you worked with that, know
about that, and how that influenced you? Robert Rich I’ve never done one of those shamanic sessions personally. I know people who
have who actually went to Peru to work with shaman in Ayahuasca ceremonies. I
think for me, I think the drugs become a displacement. And also we can too easily attach
ourselves to various cultural traditions which are different from our own.
It’s important, I think, not to graft traditions inaccurately or inappropriately between cultures. Part of the reason for doing the kind of music I do, and I said I would get back to it early, early in this long talk,
one of the purposes of the sleep concert and this idea of ritual was to try to
find a way to create a grounding ritual that was communal and public, but yet
was modern in the 20th or 21st century and could work conceptually with our
technological and scientific world view, and that didn’t require a credulousness
in a certain realm. I mean, in other words, I don’t have to believe that I’m
riding the leopard with coyote. You know, I don’t have to touch the snake. The language
of shamanic ritual is very specific to each culture. And our culture has a new
language, and so we need a new ritual; one that’s appropriate to us. I don’t
know what it is yet. I’m still looking. Todd L. Burns Sorry. You’ve worked with other cultures, their music in your own. I’m
wondering if you maybe talk about some of the ones that you have and why you
felt that they have been special to your language, your musical language. Robert Rich I’ll try to say it really quickly is that I think I just gravitate towards the
sound of a certain way of using melody and drone. And it’s a sound, if you just
look at an arc that goes from North Africa across Persia and Eastern Europe
and down across North India into Indonesia, you’ve got an influence, which has
been carried since the Muslim revolution in the 600s, but it came before then.
There’s a language that’s very ancient. You can even hear it in Coptic
Ethiopian and you can hear it in pre-Muslim Himalayan music. There was a way
of using melody that relates to ecstasy. When Islamic music found that within
their own culture, they carried it around other cultures, and so you find it
elsewhere. It’s universal, and it’s very human. That’s what gets me. It’s when
a melody starts doing things to my brain that change me. And it’s the energy, it’s
a very pure, very direct communication. My friendships with Indian musicians
and with some Eastern European musicians... If they can get that sound, that’s
all I’m looking for. [laughs] It’s what I’m always try to find. It’s why I play the
instruments I do and I’m playing flute or a lap steel guitar. I’m just
searching for it and I don’t have the right training. I mean that’s fine.
That’s my honey. Audience Member Hi. OK. You know about frequencies. I really like drone music. I really like
microtones, I like dissonance, and just vibrations in music. I was just talking
to Nick recently about this, actually. At one point, in more religious
contexts, hundreds or thousands of years ago when religious music... Religious music, they found
the frequencies that would maybe [be] more enchanting; that would affect people,
like chakra systems, or things of that nature, in a positive way; or they could
see the effects of these frequencies on people. I feel like I don’t know
enough about this. But at some point, the churches, they realized the control
they could have over people and found these certain frequency ranges that kinda
became oppressive, actually, and have become the main scale of Western music
now. I think about that a lot because in Western music, you’re very specific
for 440s A; all these things, and it omits all these other frequencies that make
you feel these other things. That’s why I’m drawn to Middle Eastern music a
lot and things like that because it’s swinging on these scales. It’s very
spiritual and it affects me physically in a different way. How do you think
about that, or like what are you feelings about that, basically? Robert Rich The history of tuning is fascinating. I also tend to be a bit of a skeptic
when people go into things like A440 versus A432 or whatever. It’s a
continuum. It’s like you’re just tuning a different A. So what? It’s a sharp A flat at that point. There’s a certain scientific undercurrent in my
thinking as well. When people go towards this way of thinking where a certain
frequency changes a certain chakra or a certain chord is the sacred chord, I
find this to be claustrophobic. Not right or wrong but just limiting. It’s a
box that we don’t need. What I love is expressive, ecstatic relationships
between frequencies. They’re all over the place. There’s relationships that
are out there and the relationships are rather simple to understand. They
relate to the harmonic series which is simple math. It’s the way that
consonant intervals relate with overtones. Once we make that observation that
we’ve got a whole-numbered ratios, we have an infinite number of whole-numbered ratios. Now, we can play around. It just expands our playground. We
have a big sandbox we can make castles with. We can build them up and tear
them down, and it’s a beautiful thing. I don’t feel that there’s one right tuning,
one wrong tuning. I don’t think that there’s a right or wrong way to do
anything. I just love expressive human creation. To me, microtonal, or just
intonation in particular, gives me a wider palate of colors. I find that to be
more expressive. I personally love the way a seven over four sounds. That’s my
favorite interval. Audience Member Thank you. Robert Rich [points] Two there and two back there. Audience Member Thanks for being here. Robert Rich Thanks. Audience Member You mentioned inner space before, I wanted to ask you what’s your take of
James Graham Ballard’s take on inner space that it’s something that includes
our perversions and our negative aspects of our minds as opposed to what
you’re referring to the things that connect the listeners or the creators with
a listeners, and well that aspect. Robert Rich What’s the writer’s name again? Graham Ballard? Audience Member J.G. Ballard. Robert Rich J.G. Ballard. Audience Member Yeah. I’m sorry. Excuse me. Robert Rich No, I’m sorry. Audience Member No, no, I’m sorry. My accent is... Sorry. It’s a little worse. Robert Rich No, that’s OK. I’m a big fan of J.G. Ballard, but he’s also a very hurt soul.
He had a really rough childhood. Audience Member About the juxtaposition between that Ballard defined inner space or something
awful in a way as opposed to what you were saying. Robert Rich Yeah. That’s true. The funny thing is I love Ballad’s writing because he also
has such an expansive way of creating that sense of loneliness of his heroes.
They’re always so stranded and so lost. But you know, that’s because everybody has their own
life experience. His story started with a very dark set of underpinnings. I
mean, you know, he grew up in a prison camp during World War II. The distinction or the
judging of good or bad and inner or outer, I think are problematic. And when we
look at the human character, we see that it’s full of light and full of dark.
And they’re all intertwined and almost inseparable. I think that’s really what
Ballard was saying is that great humanity, great kindness can be infolded with
great cruelty, just as birth and death are part of the same process. I think
that, maybe as an indirect way to answer that, I’ll describe a piece that
Annea Lockwood did that moved me very, very deeply. I think this might
encompass this idea of birth and death. She referenced a Shona ritual in
Ghanaian culture that, when a child is born, they would find a certain branch of
an acacia tree that splits apart and then, because the tree grows funny it
grows back together again. They would separate that branch out from the tree
when the mother is pregnant. And when the baby is born, if the baby lives,
they break that circle of branch apart and keep it with that child for the
duration of his or her life. When that person dies, 20, 50, 80 years later, in
the burial ritual, that stick, which is part of their collection of life
possessions is buried with them and connected back over their body. What this
deals with is this idea that was very common also within the surrealists, that... And I’m
talking in particular about the writer... Todd L. Burns Breton? Robert Rich Not Breton. It was actually... [points to head] My Google is not working right now. [laughter] I’ll get
it. I’ll get it back there but he wrote a lot on sex and death in particular.
The French have a lovely word for orgasm which is “La petite mort.” This idea
though that he was... George Bataille is the writer. Bataille dealt with the
idea of life and death as that life was the discontinuity. That birth is
discontinuous, and death is a return to continuity. This Shona ritual is
identical to that where they’re showing that that circle is broken by birth
and returned into death. And so, when we think about our lives in an egocentric way,
we’re saying that this separation of us from the universe is defining us, but
really, what it’s doing is, it’s defining our death. This is a very brief
moment of assemblage of structure. It changes over a course of a lifetime, and
then it dissolves again. Annea Lockwood did an amazing performance art piece
with a friend of hers who was a sculptor and was dying of throat cancer, or actually, the
whole body was taken over by cancer. She interviewed him just a day before he
died. He could barely speak, his voice was all torn up. He was talking about
coming to terms with death. She played this recording while intersplicing it
with sounds of the forest and chopping wood, and walking, and just people in a
natural environment. She did this at New Music America [festival] in 1980. She sat on the
stage, cross-legged. She played this tape for about 25 minutes. She created
one single motion that took 25 minutes to make. She started with two sticks on
her lap and very slowly, 25 minutes later, the two sticks were connected at
the top of her head. It was so powerful. I’m even crying right now. It’s very,
very hard to tell the story because the audience afterwards, silent. The
performance showed the answer to your question. Audience Member Thank you for that. Audience Member I have one. Hi. My question will be very mundane after this, I’m afraid. Robert Rich No problem. It’s OK. Audience Member I really enjoyed your story about coming from the airport and trying to enjoy
the surroundings by just looking at them, and not filter them through a
possible camera or phone, whatever. I was thinking, do you feel that there is
an equivalent to that in music? Like the thing that live visuals or videos
kind of might take away from a sheer enjoyment of music. Robert Rich Absolutely. In fact, it depends on the purpose of the music I would say. If
the purpose is entertainment, if you’re trying to create excitement... I mean if
you’re doing a pop concert, if you’re Beyoncé or something like that, you’re
not going to do some rarefied thing, you’re going to put on a full on
performance. That’s what people are paying you for. If you want to do
something profound, though, you might try pulling away influences, pulling
away stimuli. This is my own feeling. It’s my own theory about art. Not
necessarily proven or true, but I feel that when fewer things impinge upon us,
they can have a stronger influence and they’ll trigger more activity inside of
our creative minds. Each person experiencing it will have potentially a more
profound experience because they have to make more of the experience inside of
themselves. Art is about creative muscle. It’s not about handing somebody a
basketful of eggs. This is a strange metaphor, but play with me here.
Essentially, in our culture, we assume that an artistic act puts information
into a box and then it conveys that information to people. It’s like a basket
of eggs. Little Red Riding Hood is coming to take cookies to her grandmother.
So let’s imagine that’s completely irrelevant. Let’s come up with a metaphor
that’s perpendicular to this. Not making it wrong or right but just saying
maybe it’s something else. What if, in fact, art is exercising a muscle.
There’s a truth muscle, a beauty muscle, an anger muscle, a fear muscle; and these
are things in our brains that the more we exercise them, the stronger they
get. If we sit here and watch world news tonight every night, we watch all the
bombings and diseases and horrors that the governments are causing on each
other, our fear muscle becomes very powerful, very strong. We become more
angry. We act in ways that are like a mouse hiding from the world. We vote in ways that
react according to fear. We treat other people according to those rules of
fear. So as artists, if we could exercise different muscles, perhaps we can
strengthen ways of behaving. It’s a little bit like if you’re an athlete and
you hire a personal trainer, they say, “Before you do anything, I just want
you to get out of your car. Don’t drive your car. Next time you go shopping,
walk to the store.” You find yourself wasting all this time walking to the
store and you’re getting something else done. You’re actually getting stronger
while you’re getting your bread and carrots. One thing might differentiate
from another action, it might sound like it’s doing something different but in
fact, it might be causing action in several different layers. It’s how all the
stories like in zen of the teacher getting people to... There’s a lovely Sufi
phrase. If you have no troubles, buy a goat. That’s because goats are pain in
the butt, right? [laughs] It’s good for you. My point is that if you look at
how multimedia impinges upon our sense and creates overstimulation, and which
can be a form of trance relating to that question back there, that kind of
overstimulated trance can create a very numbing effect on the brain, and it
creates a shutdown. What we do is we become very used to filling in all of the
gaps with sensory information and not actually creating more ourselves. If we
want to stimulate people instead of just turn them into zombies, what we can
do is start thinning out the information so that we do little pinpricks and
remove things and then start exciting their own muscles. Audience Member Thank you. Robert Rich Yeah. Todd L. Burns We have a question back there. Audience Member Hi. I have a couple of questions. One is like, I’m a big fan of industrial
music and Throbbing Gristle and the whole idea of Genesis P-Orridge, Thee
Temple ov Psychick Youth and everything. It’s not that clear that even if you
read all the text and everything. Do you think that these guys, the
industrial musicians, they work with the term of magic? Because I think that
those guys were the ones that after the Second World War, meaning a globalized
world, embraced this idea of death. They were working with, I don’t know, what
magic for them is like... As you said, with this performance you were
describing. I want to know why they got to that point when ritual and techno
shamanism, as they were calling it, it’s now about giving significance to
things because in this world we’re so globalized and virtuality is, I don’t
know, this lack of spirituality, it needs to be filled with something that in
the end is technology, is industrial. The name is like... Makes their direct
reference not to nature but to, I don’t know, factories or postwar stuff. Do
you think that it’s fair to say that magic nowadays has more to do with these
technological and hyperreal environment more than how it used to be like in
many years ago or with the old cultures? Robert Rich I think it’s choices we make. I think one of the main points, although it’s
true that industrial culture, industrial art, Psychic TV, I guess all those
folks in general, and specifically, I think Genesis P-Orridge’s fascination
with the satanic cult ritual stuff, for lack of a better word, which I find
childish, just silly to be honest. I don’t find it evil or anything, I just
kind of... Goofy. I think that what it refers to is the personal choice
directs your direction. It’s an act of free will. Genesis’s particular decision
to focus on the macabre or the death side of things, the Thanatos, the death
urge, is a personal direction that is natural to his inclination. You find
that when Throbbing Gristle broke up and when Chris and Cosey went their own
way, they had a very different energy, a much more positive energy. Coming
from that same idea of music as energy, music as a potential transformative
medium, but yet, not obsessing over the thanatotic but rather choosing to
direct energies into places where they can actually be functional. Again, I
encourage you to use what in spirituality, they called the touch stone. What
results in the personality of the people who are practicing something? Are
they becoming better? Or are they becoming worn-out or decaying in some way?
I’m not making any sort of religious judgment call upon what’s good or evil. I
don’t have any of that. It’s not about good and evil. It’s about focusing
energy towards things that are life-affirming. And we know that life and death are
all interfolded, but we can write songs about how the Nazis killed millions of
people with gas chambers like “Zyklon B Zombie,” for example. We can write
songs about how a friend of Genesis’s was an orderly in the hospital and
described the patient who was completely burnt, “Hamburger Lady.” Or we can
create ritual that in fact moves people in a direction that gets them to do
something to change. Now, the funny thing is that that very negative dark
magic that he would be more attached to also would work to energize me as a
teenager who needed that at that moment. But then I’m not going to sit there
and wallow in it. I’m going to use it as a kick in the ass. It gets me to
start doing something to change the world. Rather than sitting there and just
morosely cocooning into a thanatotic paranoia. I think that choosing to
activate in certain directions, not about right or wrong or good or bad, but
in terms of what energizes us to change or do something. Then what keeps us
healthy and what keeps us sustaining. I would say that Genesis is probably not
the best example of how to live a healthy life. [laughs] Audience Member Another question, coming back to the sound part of your work and this
aesthetic: Do you think that modular synthesis, even if it’s on hardware or in
Ableton Live or something like that, you were saying like when you were a
child, you were working as if it was like play. I once saw this really
monumental performance by Robert Henke, the “Studies for Thunder.” It’s more
than a concert. It was like a sonic sculpture. Robert Rich His work is great. He’s a good friend of mine, too, and he’s brilliant. Audience Member Do you think that in that way modular synthesis, since it’s not like directly
related to a keyboard or notes and all that, because some musicians don’t like
for them to be encapsulated in this... I don’t know what they call like sonic
sculptures. I think that, for example, you’re making an experience and its
purpose is to be like reflective with the audience to see themselves through
the mirror. You’re putting in front... Robert Rich Forgive me for cutting you off, I wanted to focus your question. Are you
referring to the purpose of the synthesis or the tools themselves? Audience Member No, the purpose and the meaning. Robert Rich What I would say about that is that the tools are just tools. It’s like
discussing which is the better hammer or shovel. We can discuss this shovel
has a point and this shovel has a blunt end. You should this one to shovel
snow but this one to dig a hole. That’s not a very interesting conversation.
What’s more interesting is why do you want to dig a hole? What is that hole
going to do for you? If you start with the reason for the sound you want to
make then you choose a tool that allows you to direct yourself into that
purpose. You start with the ‘why’ and the tool will follow. The tools don’t
matter. Yeah, that’s my answer. [laughs] Todd L. Burns We still have time for one more. Robert Rich See if we can squeeze these two. Audience Member OK, I’ll be brief. You mentioned listening to these radio show in midnight on
those halcyon days. I sum up all the talk about magic and spirituality, and
toxic media and toxic music. I think of this show as a Bay Area show, like
spreading good vibes to sensitive people. Robert Rich A bit of that, yeah. [laughs] Audience Member I’m a radio DJ. Do you think radio has a role, such as bell tower in a
community spreading the gospel? Do you think those responsibilities as a DJ to
enhance the vibrations of a whole community, of a whole city? Robert Rich I think it can, especially terrestrial radio because it’s communal, it has a
space around it. The key to me is that... The idea of the bell tower, it
reminds immediately of the sort of idea of a church with a message coming from
above down. What I like about community radio is that it’s not like that. It’s
actually people sharing their passion with other people. Like college radio, a
bunch of students and a bunch of people who hang out, they share their love of
music and they get everybody excited. And it’s really a sharing, it’s like cooking
for each other. It’s not a bell tower, it’s actually a commune. It’s something
a lot more fun. It’s a poetry reading. Do you know what I mean? It’s really a
coffee shop. It’s not like a high-order sacred message. I much prefer that low-level sharing of excitement and passion. I love terrestrial radio, and I hope it
survives. The Internet is wonderful, but there’s no real community when the
person who likes your Facebook page is in Greece or Czechoslovakia or China.
There’s a kind of community, a different kind, a good one and that’s excellent
because then I can meet those people here. I doubt that in Japan, I’ll meet
any of my Facebook friends except the ones that I met for this thing. That’s
so artificial. This is real and that’s what I love. Yeah, one last one there. Audience Member I actually think I answered it. Thought it through and then I don’t have any
[questions anymore]. Robert Rich OK. What were you thinking? Audience Member In relation to that I was going to ask, do the tools ever... So the tool doesn’t guide you? Robert Rich Sure it does sometimes. Anybody who says it doesn’t is lying but that’s one
reason why you want to limit your tools. If you have too many tools, then you
don’t know where to go. What’s good is that if you choose to paint in oils on
canvas, it will force you to make certain decisions over a certain time. If
you choose to paint in watercolors, you’re going to do a certain kind of
thing. If you choose to have every one of them right next to you all at once,
you’re not going to do know where to start. Yes, the tools do limit you and
limits are good. But if you start with purpose, and then pick a few tools that
you play with. Then you’ll probably get more done. Yeah. OK. Todd L. Burns Well, Robert will be around if anyone else has questions. For now, thank you
very much Robert Rich. [standing applause] Robert Rich Thank you! [gestures / bows]