Robert Rich

The career of Robert Rich is emblematic of how a self-taught kid can become an internationally recognized composer in the era of home studios and independent distribution. Rich began composing music for campus students. That music became part of the new age canon, and for several years Rich emerged as one of the most important musicians of that movement. However, the significance of Rich’s music transcends genres, and in the 1990s it acquired increasingly personal characteristics. Fascinated by an architect like Gaudí, Rich invented a form of “organic” music that stands among the most remarkable of the late 20th century.

Robert Rich, born in 1963 in Menlo Park to academic parents, practically grew up on the Stanford University campus. Self-taught, he began at age thirteen to build synthesizers and improvise Tangerine Dream–style pieces on his home piano. In 1979, during high school, he formed a band devoted to the industrial music then popular in the Bay Area: Quote Unquote, a trio of synthesizer, bass, and guitar that made extensive use of tapes and electronic effects.

In 1981 Rich began studying Mathematics and Psychology. Continuing his electronic experiments on his own, he also recorded his first self-produced cassette, Sunyata (1981 – Hypnos, 2000), containing three long compositions: Dervish Dreamtime (twenty minutes), which, cradled in long static figures, recalls the ambient music of Brian Eno; the title track (twenty-six minutes), a tangle of lugubrious resonances immersed in a dense cicada-like crackle; and Oak Spirits (forty-three minutes), entirely improvised live in his dorm room at Stanford (a flow of coldly mathematical harmonic oscillations over a continuous sound of rain).

The main influences on the young Rich were Maryanne Amacher (psychoacoustics guru) and Pauline Oliveros (deep listening guru), both practitioners at the time of styles based on prolonged stasis, as well as the German “cosmic” school. Perhaps even more influential were Indian classical music and the Indonesian gamelan, as well as surrealist and abstract painting. Rich was not yet interested in music in the conventional sense, but rather in creating a psychoactive space where the listener could move freely. The goal was trance.

In early 1982, Rich held the first of the “sleep concerts” that made him famous in the electronic music scene: Rich played from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. for an audience that, equipped with their own sleeping bags, slept on the floor. The music consisted simply of extremely slow melodic phrases that varied almost imperceptibly. These concerts for a “sleeping audience” were the first practical realizations of a personal reinterpretation of the ideas of LaMonte Young and the “sound sculptors” of the time: music as a living organism that can evolve independently of the presence of a performer or listener. (It was probably the first time in the history of music that the audience was not only allowed to fall asleep during a concert but was actually encouraged to do so).

It was thanks to the fame of those “sleep concerts” that his 1983 cassettes, Trances (two suites: Cave Paintings and Hayagriva) and Drones (Seascape and Wheel Of Earth), gained some circulation. In these works, Rich simply summarized his hyper-static electronic performance techniques.
Cave Paintings, in particular, with its torpid, almost imperceptible slow motion of cascading chords over an eerie background of woodland noises, and Seascape, a half-hour symphonic poem whose languid vibrations/hallucinations imitate waves and seagulls in a subliminal form of impressionism, demonstrate a greater familiarity with the electronic medium. However, the underlying premise remains the same: making music without really making music, as Brian Eno taught. Sound masses move with excruciating slowness around sparse chords, like nebulas suspended between different centers of gravitational attraction. In a sense, Rich achieved a fusion of Eno’s ambient music with Schulze’s cosmic music, blending the psychological and the painterly approaches to electronic music.
Wheel Of Earth, while maintaining the stream-of-consciousness form, replaces the anemic tremors of the other pieces with a powerful foundation of rumbles, whistles, and assorted dissonances, gradually building a tragic climax that feels more like a therapeutic shock than ecstatic trance. The thematic development is not absent; it is simply indecipherable.
Hayagriva, on the other hand, is the programmatic quintessence of the period: a sequence of endless “drones,” some at nearly subsonic frequencies, inducing a profane, non-sacred, distinctly Western trance rather than an Eastern-inspired one. With Rich, the scientist triumphs over the mystic in exploring the suggestive power of sound.
Both albums were reissued as Trances/Drones (Extreme, 1994).

In 1984, Rich joined CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), then directed by John Chowning (the “inventor” of FM synthesis). In those studios, he was able to experiment with high-end music production technology and precise tonal control.

Live (Multimood, 1985) and Inner Landscapes (Auricle, 1987) document live performances. The second one contains one of his most accessible compositions (recorded in 1985), the Terry Riley–inspired electronic raga Approach, a long initiation ritual unfolding through shadowy abysses of barely perceptible sound effects, sustained tones, and somber resonances.

Having graduated in Psychology, from 1985 Rich began working as a researcher at Stephen LaBerge’s Lucidity Institute, in the laboratory dedicated to the phenomenon of conscious dreaming (“lucid dreaming”), which allows the neurophysiological study of the relationships between mind and brain, and in particular, consciousness.

In 1985, in Hollywood, where he had gone to create the music for a theatrical production, Rich met Steve Roach, another young electronic musician.

Around the same time, Rich decided to form a new rock band, the Urdu. With Andy McGowan on bass (already part of Quote Unquote) and Rick Davies on guitar, Rich returned briefly to the industrial funk-jazz style he had started with. But it was only a short-lived venture.

At that time, the album Numena (Multimood, 1987) was in gestation, a groundbreaking work that already contained all the themes of his later career. The Other Side Of Twilight is a typical electronic poem in the tradition of Schulze, with its evocative astral breaths and driving sequencer rides, but for twelve minutes it is Terry Riley’s minimalism that dominates, and the ensuing stasis is populated by episodic noises, stretched hisses, and tangible signs of the end of entropy. A finale of almost raga-like religious intensity seals what is in fact not a cosmic watercolor but a philosophical poem.
The second part of the album, predominantly acoustic, is darker: from the distorted sounds of the equatorial jungle in Numen to the dreamlike vertigo of The Walled Garden (for just intonation), the model is more than ever Brian Eno’s ambient music, or at most Jon Hassell’s abstract world music. These are pieces without dramatic development; they simply “live,” metabolize sounds, and grow: they are organic matter before they are music.
The leitmotif underlying Rich’s entire career is the Platonic idea of substance hidden behind appearance. If Mathematics is transcendent beauty, then just intonation is the ideal means to express this beauty. Rich’s music seeks to express the tension between two forces: the Platonic ideal of the mathematical essence of things and their physical manifestation, the biomorphic, liquid life inherent in the human body. Humans are bodies emerged from the ocean, and these conscious pools of ocean represent the pinnacle of the organic quality of things—a quality Rich calls “glurp,” which in art has parallels in Gaudí’s architecture and Dali’s painting.

Geometry (Spalax, 1991), recorded between 1983 and 1987, attempts to convey the idea of this “glurp.” The album begins by expressing the most Platonic side of Rich, the part closest to Riley’s sensibility, the most structured; but it gradually evolves toward a more organic, liquid, and dense sound, becoming progressively less mathematical and increasingly lively.
The album aims to explore the relationship between Mathematics and emotion, as celebrated in Bach’s music. Primes is a suite for electronic keyboards rigidly anchored to a mathematical algorithm, and in the intensely religious tone of the improvisations, the influence of the Art of Fugue is evident. The “dervishes” of Terry Riley and the cosmic sketches of the second Schulze provide the foundation for Interlocking Circles. By emphasizing the “cosmic” elements, the music acquires a strongly dreamlike, almost psychedelic quality in the long Geometry Of The Skies, the centerpiece of the work, where the relationships are still based on just intonation, but the more physical qualities of the music, such as timbre, begin to stand out.
From this point onward, the album descends into more “physical” and human rhythms and melodies, even touching on world music in Geomancy and Logos.

The boom of New Age culture, along with the parallel evolution of Rich’s music toward a less demanding style, also allowed him to enter the New Age circuit and benefit from a much larger audience. Rainforest (Hearts Of Space, 1989), the first album of this new phase, driven by an environmentalist theme, thus became one of the year’s best-sellers. The album unfolds around the contrast between the forest—representing the state of nature—and the desert, what remains after human invasion.
After the tinkling overture of Mbira, the album rises into a festive hymn to idyllic, lush nature: the Rainforest Suite, suspended in a cloud of gentle melodic whispers, bucolic flute cantilenas, and slow aquatic sounds. Sanctuary, with its jumble of sinister sounds borrowed from cosmic music but applied to simulate the noises of the forest, builds a suspense that serves as a warning or premonition of the danger looming over nature. Faster, industrial rhythms mix with the sounds of the forest in Raining Room, and the ordeal concludes with Veil Of Mist (one of his most dramatic and dissonant pieces), contemplating in a funereal register the sterile and melancholic landscape of tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Steve Roach had invited Rich to work on the rhythms for the monumental Dreamtime Return: this marked the beginning of a collaboration that in 1990 yielded another masterpiece, Strata. Although the album bears heavily the stamp of Roach’s production, Rich has the opportunity to pay homage to one of the great artists of “glurp,” Dalí, and to Surrealist art in general, so much so that one of the most hallucinatory tracks is titled after The Persistence Of Memory, the famous painting by the Spanish master.

With Gaudi (Hearts Of Space, 1991), a phase of Rich’s career comes to an end: the album abandons the “thematic” descriptivism of Rainforest to return to the transcendent program of Geometry. The pretext is to explore the comparison between the mathematical principles of music and those of architecture, taking advantage of Gaudí, whose buildings emanate the tension between the organic and the mathematical so dear to Rich.
In reality, Gaudí does not apply these principles with the same rigidity as Geometry: the algorithmic structures of Sagrada Familia and Tracery are animated by sound effects and melodic figures, a rococo arrangement propels the carillon of Silhouette, the clockwork mechanism of the menacing Spiral Steps grows to symphonic proportions, and Harmonic Clouds evaporates into an ineffable flow of electronic hisses.

The mathematical foundation is always skillfully camouflaged in a pleasing environment. The second half explores more spontaneously the impressionistic quality of Rich’s music, moving from the watercolor of Air (flute breaths, electronic echoes, and metallic tinklings) to the slow-motion crawl of Serpent (slithering through brambles with intermittent hisses in a psychoanalytic nightmare atmosphere), culminating in the surreal chimes of Minaret, a continuous triumph of imagination.

After another collaboration with Steve Roach, Soma (the Greek root of the word “body”), Rich formed another rock band, the Amoeba, with bassist McGowan. Their first album, Eye Catching (Soundscape, 1992), features atmospheric songs underpinned by intense psychic turbulence, employing subliminal narration, horror effects, industrial clangs, and long instrumental interludes.

At this point in his career, Propagation (Hearts Of Space, 1994), which took three years to complete, represents almost a return to Rainforest. The seven trance pieces (averaging eight minutes each) put the most advanced recording techniques at the service of a concept of music without time or space, a form of world music that is impossible to pinpoint. The semiotic signs alluding to ethnic folklore are, in reality, purely formal: the percussive carpet, which also serves as a unifying theme, and the acoustic instruments, sourced from around the world (some played by Forrest Fang). The electronics are even more discreet than usual, just a thin layer here and there to make the thousand phosphorescent highlights shine more intensely.
The absence of a strong melody and the reduction of harmony to its bare minimum create a sense of disorientation: Rich increasingly relies on percussiveness for his "drone/trance" pieces. Upon it, his "mysteries" take shape. The sensual melody of Animus dances over swampy rhythms and the earthy tones of a Jon Hassell-like flute. Even more cryptic is the caravan of sound effects in Lifeblood, perhaps the album's pinnacle, pasted one after another onto the melodic tapestry of continuously shifting electronics.
When the rhythm halts, it is as if a change of state occurs, from solid to liquid: Luminous Horizon is really just that—a "luminous horizon" of distant chords, blurred figures in very slow motion, and traces across the cosmos.
The entire album unfolds on the terrain of the subconscious, in a slow unraveling of harmonic whispers, as if the music does not originate from a substance that must be cemented but from a matter that gradually disintegrates.

The musical form favored by Rich during this period is, in fact, a variant of the Indian "alaap": the slow, exquisitely gentle introduction in which the raga player focuses on the emotional essence of the piece before beginning to perform it. In this sense, Yearning (Hearts Of Space, 1995) emphasizes the ineffability and imponderability of his "alaaps" (in this case, duets with sarod player Lisa Moskow). The sarod improvisations slightly disrupt the atmosphere, but the important thing is that the pursuit of the ultimate, definitive trance continues. Gradually, the idea is taking shape that a harmony can be both delicate and lush. The breezes that stir the instruments in Nada or the harmonic boulders lurking in Kali are invisible sonic agents, yet nonetheless complex and dizzying. These agents engage in a duel with the listener’s mind for control of consciousness.

Like many other electronic music greats in the mid-1990s, Rich also felt the need to tackle the ambient music he had helped create. On Stalker (Hearts Of Space, 1995), dedicated to the mysterious and sinister "Zone" depicted in Tarkovsky’s film of the same name, Rich opts for a sound fairly distant from the "organic" harmonies he had previously championed. The most evocative results are perhaps those closest to Brian Eno’s pure stasis, such as Synergistic Perceptions, where one can recognize the subtle hand of the master manipulator of the psyche. The nightmarish sounds of Hidden Refuge and the noisy tour de force of Omnipresent Boundary owe much to his partner Lustmord and his art of “found sounds.” Delusion Fields lets a glimmer of humanism surface, with dark voices submerged in ancestral calls. Everywhere reigns a macabre suspense, a vertigo of catacombs and desecrated crypts, reaching its apex in the closing Point Of No Return, where intermittent hisses, broken rhythms, and otherworldly screams merge into a single vast universal radiation. More in line with Rich’s own explorations are Elemental Trigger and Undulating Terrain, which feature dense psycho-drones that always seem on the verge of exploding.

Rich's music was becoming more and more hermetic as the years go by, and the reviewer was beginning to get lost in the labyrinthine flourishes of his "organic" electronics. A Troubled Resting Place (Fathom, 1996) is emblematic. Compositions such as The Simorgh Sleeps On Velvet Tongues are ever more amorphous: slow-motion, directionless, chaotic, propelled by a tremendous force that is nevertheless confined to the background, they continously disintegrate and reassemble, like a lego toy in the hands of a whimsical child.
Bioelectric Plasma is the fruit of a deranged mind, of a Frankenstein of music intent upon building monsters ever more anthropomorphous in order to probe the darkest recesses of the human soul. Rich's compositions have no script, no plot, no linear evolution; just mutations, metamorphoses, sonic incidents that are immediately metabolized. On a completely different plane, Night Sky Replies is his take at ambient music. The album's only flaw is a lack of cohesiveness, due to the fact that the tracks were composed for various occasions.

This period also includes a collaboration with Paul Schutze: Narratives (Manifold, 1996). Robert Rich and guitarist Rick Davies are the driving forces behind Amoeba, a project straddling the line between new age and rock. Watchful (Lektronic Soundscapes, 1997) is their first album. Inside resembles one of those tracks where Gregorian chants are distilled over a modern rhythm. Footless, perhaps due to the cello, counterbalances the languor of the other tracks. Big Clouds recalls Brian Eno’s watercolors. But Saragossa falls into ethnic new age, and Any Other Sky into jazz-influenced new age, albeit well executed. The best track is ultimately the instrumental Watchful Eyes, a small avant-garde concerto that has little in common with the album’s “songs.” In general, the music is too delicate to become truly gripping. Rich sings, but rather than traditional singing, he lends his voice to electronic manipulations.

Italian electronic musician Alio Die (Stefano Musso) makes a significant contribution to the success of Rich’s new album: Fissures (December 1996 – Fathom, 1997). The sound is perhaps the most ethereal of his career, and he finally returns to the “morphisms,” intricate and intangible, that made him famous.
Rich and Musso overturn the concept of ceremonial music, stripping it of its rhythmic foundation while preserving its supernatural emphasis. Turning To Stone is the most crystalline page of this sacred book: flute flights entwine with the majestic chords of electronics (almost like a pipe organ), without ever resolving. Rich’s “organic” murmurs and Roach-style ethnic percussion create the sacred atmosphere of A Canopy Of Shivers, through which spirals of flutes and trumpets streak like comets.
This is music of imperceptible gestures, music of slow chromatic metamorphoses, abusing the Doppler effect to make a sound lose or gain its physical characteristics. The same principle applies at the polyphonic level in tracks like The Divine Radiance Of Invertebrates, which seem static but actually progress toward a tense and complex harmony, almost symphonic in scope. The finest “deconstruction” of ceremonial music appears in Road To Wirikuta (eighteen minutes), which preserves the drum strikes but immerses them in a desolate landscape of unfinished melodies, ebbing and flowing without ever finding a harmonic center; it slows the rhythm and distorts the timbre, while the landscape empties, leaving only echoes in the end.
Some pieces are as delightful as they are cryptic. The muffled reverberations of Mycelia produce a nocturnal, funeral procession accompanied by muted flute phrases in the shadows. One of the most evocative tracks is Sirena, with its delicate chaos of pulverized sounds over which increasingly poignant chords soar (particularly those of the steel guitar), evoking sirens from the depths of the subconscious. This is the most stereotypical new age music, but created by a master of contemporary music. The use of acoustic instruments (as sources for electronic sounds) allows for angelic and fairy-tale timbres that make Rich’s sound infinitely more human.
This album, together with Gaudi, Propagation, and Stalker, forms the mature tetralogy of Rich.

Below Zero (Side Effects, 1998 - Soundscape Productions, 2005) collects pieces composed for multi-artist compilations between 1993 and 1996. The highlight is, by far, the 21-minute four-part suite Star Maker (1996), a constantly mutating stream of drones that evokes a spaceship exploring the vast empty spaces of the cosmos. The sounds hints at galactic bodies that are hissing, moaning, howling at us from light years away. Those myriad "voices" of black holes, quasars, neutron stars and dark matter occasionally impersonate human voices, as if the infinitely inhuman met the infinitely human in the deep abyss of primeval spacetime. But then the fluctuations move to other frequencies, that humans cannot even comprehend, just cryptic signs in an ocean of semantic contradictions. Ambient music does not get more dynamic and evocative than this. The other pieces do not live up to the standards of this major work, although Liquid Air is an intriguing transposition of the human voice in the context of cosmic music and Requiem is a floating carpet of interlocking vocal drones All in all, the album displays an obsession with the human voice.

Seven Veils (Hearts Of Space, 1998) is surprisingly the most ethnic, rhythmic, and melodic work of his career. The compositions (except one) are in “just intonation” and are almost all inspired by Middle Eastern folklore. Rich alternates between flutes, guitars, and dulcimer, and borrows David Torn’s guitar and Hans Christian’s cello.
Rich is as superb as he is unrecognizable in tracks like Coils: a melodic guitar twang (like a Duane Eddy of new age music), an almost Hawaiian tintinnabulation in counterpoint, driving African polyrhythms, and ethereal electronic keyboard melodies in the background. The long flute invocation in Alhambra (ten minutes) collides in a spectacular way with the hallucinatory feedback of Torn’s guitar. Dominating the album is the even longer suite Book Of Ecstasy (fifteen minutes), in whose three movements Rich unfolds his full arranging skill while simultaneously surrendering to visions of ancient desert caravans.
In contrast, the “lighter” folkloric vignettes of Talisman Of Touch and Ibn Sina are airier and more compact compositions in which Rich indulges in the exotic and the arcane. The work closes with Lapis (another ten minutes, perhaps his “neoclassical” peak), a duet with Christian’s cello murmuring in the folds of the flute’s song, while percussion dances frenetically. In these final minutes, Rich’s attempt to assimilate the demeanor of classical music and the practice of jazz improvisation within the context of ethnic electronics becomes evident: the performance is austere and introspective, as if Don Cherry were performing a chamber concert. At the same time, Seven Veils, together with Rainforest, is the most accessible album of his career.

By just over thirty years old, Rich had already become a sort of philosopher of the new music emerging at the border between avant-garde and folk music. In his musical theories, the hidden instincts of much of new age find formal expression.

The scope of his work is already immense. In his early period he transformed ambient music from alchemy to science, in the second he redefined cosmic music, and in the last he deconstructed world music.

Humidity (Hypnos/Soundscape, 2000) documents a series of improvised concerts.

Amoeba's new album, Pivot (Release, 2000), shows Robert Rich and Rick Davies further improving their technique. While essentially concocting dreamy lullabies, the duo fuses styles as different as Galaxie 500's psychedelia, Rich's "sleep concerts", bossanova, Brian Eno's ambient impressionism (Fireflies), early Grateful Dead (Pivot), and Simon and Garfunkel's gentle folk-rock (Moonlight Flowers). Rich's orchestration populates the landscapes of these Lieder with countless sonic events, but Rich's is an art of mimicry, and listeners will barely notice the busy backgrounds. Standout tracks are the suave folk-pop of No Empty Promises, the slow-motion, hypnotic, piano and cello nocturne Sparks and the lonely instrumental, the flute, cello and piano chamber sonata Miniature.

Somnium (Hypnos, 2001) is a DVD disc containing a seven-hour sleep concert (virtually the longest composition ever recorded). Rich is back in familiar territory and his improvisational style shines more than ever. Rich is one of the greatest improvisers and the "sleep concert" is the format that best fits him. This is a majestic music that borrows from LaMonte Young's minimalist experiments, the "deep listening" school, Paul Horn's jazz solos and spiritual chants from around the globe. Softly floating drones caress a landscape that is being flooded with gentle rain effects, and will soon be swept by arid winds and haunted by distant voices. Somnium is a monumental detour that harks back to a personal beginning and projects into the collective subconscious.

Bestiary (Hypnos, 2001) marks yet another turn in Rich's career. On one hand, there is more tension, more action, more contrast. On the other hand, the timbres are harsher, the harmony is twisted, the counterpoint is irregular. Texture steps to the side and rhythm moves to the center. A convoluted, schizoid digital rhythm populates Mantis Intentions, while massive drones glide through the sky like comets. Bestiary dispenses with the drones and lets beats and effects simulate a pack of beasts (somehow re-enacting Pink Floyd's Several Species Of Small Furry Animals). Despite the album's title, this album takes a break from the "organic" (and austere) sound of the past. Mostly, these are light electronic vignettes, although intriguing ideas lie beneath the surface.
The dizzy (almost "stoned") world-music of Nesting On Cliffsides is probably a misstep, while the metaphysical surrealism of Folded Space deserved a longer and deeper treatment. Possibly aware that this album does not live up to his compositional standards, Rich appends to the album the sumptuous mantra of Premonition Of Circular Clouds, influenced by Indian meditational music and Terry Riley's liturgical works (and, possibly, Grateful Dead's early psychedelic jams).

Outpost (2002) is a collaboration with British synth pioneer Ian Boddy, heavily influenced by cosmic music.

Temple of the Invisible (Soundscape, 2003) is dedicated to lost rituals of third-world civilizations. For the first time, Rich employs only acoustic instruments, no electronics. Besides Rich himself on flute, zither and percussion, the performers include conch player Tom Heasley, Paul Hanson on bassoon and bombard, Forrest Fang on Chinese zither and Turkish baglama, and vocalists Percy Howard and Sukhawat Ali Khan. While some of Rich's fluent magic gets lost in the translation from electronic to acoustic music, meticolous compositions such as Antalieh (for Jon Hassell-ian conch trumpet and Gregorian choir), the eleven-minute Fasanina for flute, free-form vocals, and the nine-minute Tulchru for stringed instruments constitute a rich repertory of exotic chamber music. The percussion instruments sound so detached and slumberous that they provide a sort of unconscious undercurrent to the conscious acts in the foreground. When the obsession for contrasting timbres and tempos is further diluted, Rich achieves the expressionist soundscape of Lan Tiku.

Calling Down the Sky (Soundscape, 2003) documents a live performance of all-new material. Unlike his studio albums, that tend to highlight new techniques, the live format allows Rich to release his inner self in a more complete and pure form. The 13-minute Erasing Traces is a solemn prayer imbued with languid, undulating Eastern phrases. The 21-minute Vertigo is a haunting fresco of floating cosmic music populated with jungle sounds and ghostly drones. Bridging the infinite unknown and the finite known, allows Rich to focus on the dualism of the primordial emotions of fear and comfort, each the alter ego of the other. The soundscape is roamed by a Jon Hassell-ian flute that seems to represent human consciousness, alone and helpless, both stunned and terrified by its condition. Supplication returns to the theme of the prayer, although at a much more subliminal level (quiet drones and sparkling percussion). This segues into Borealis, which is more of the same but in a more pictorial style, elegant drones sculpting supernatural ambience. Far less ambitious than his studio works, this live album is, nonetheless, a key text to decipher Rich's spiritual vision.

Open Window (Soundscape, 2004) is a solo piano album. Far less ambitious than previous works, this is Rich at his most intimate and warm. The eight impessionistic vignettes borrow stylistic ideas from Erik Satie and Terry Riley to craft gentle structures in the air. Notable moments are the ecstatic crescendo of Parting Clouds, the majestic and intense fantasia of Insular, the delicate fluttering of Past Glances, and especially the youthful enthusiasm of Parallel Horizons, evoking images of exuberant spring like Vivaldi's music.

Echo Of Small Things (Soundscape, 2005), ostensibly a collaboration with photographer David Agasi, is composed of nine ambient pieces for electronic instruments, guitar, flute and "small things". Pathways is canonical relaxation music for sustained tones and natural sounds (chirping birds). The soundscape of Circle Unwound has a harsher texture built out of narrow intervals, is roamed by metallic dissonances and is slowly engulfed by ocean waves. Scent of Night Jasmine breaks the stationary atmosphere with a Paul Horn-ian flute phrase that sounds like a spiritual invocation. All the pieces are slowly evolving organisms, defined by either a geometric combination of ascending and descending sounds or by a languor of constant sounds. While they don't achieve the intensity and richness of Rich's "sleep concerts", they update Rich's vocabulary with new sonic possibilities. Probably a transitional album, but one that preludes to bolder moves.

Lithosphere (DIN, 2005) is a second collaboration with Ian Boddy, and one that differs in a striking manner both from their first collaboration and from Rich's usual style. There is a lot more movement than usual in pieces such as Lithosphere, Vent and Chamber The cosmic undercurrent is a mere backdrop for the erratic polyrhythms (alternating between pseudo-gamelan tinkling and metallic cacophony) and for the John McLaughlin-like guitar glissando (Rich's new passion, alternating betweem the robust and languid extremes of the spectrum). When the percussive flow stabilize, as in Geode, it is easier to recognize Rich's somatic traits (e.g., the organic revolutions of sonic matter). When it disappears, as in Metamorphosis and Melt, it is easier to reconnect Boddy's existential angst, albeit tempered by Rich's "sleep" aesthetic.

Sonically speaking, Electric Ladder (2005), a work for analog synthesizers and acoustic instruments (guitar, flute, bassoon, soprano sax), marked a return to the morphing organic music of Gaudi` (1991). Electric Ladder is a raga for the digital age: a sensual electronic melody interlaced with frantic tabla-like electronic percussion. And, just like raga music, it stands also as a study in melody-rhythm counterpoint, in how to blend two dimensions of sound that move wildly apart. Shadowline is more of the same, but Poppy Fields weaves an accordion-like litany around some watery pulses, and the droning fanfare of Sky Tunnel is propelled by festive Michael Nyman-ian polyrhythms. Both these latter pieces transform the language of electronic ambient music and of minimalist repetition into a cinematic language. The last three, and shorter, tracks do not quite belong to the same project. The flute meditation of Aquifer and the languid haunting drones of Never Alone sound like elegant, classy rewrites of traditional ambient music with spiritual overtones.

Rich's cosmic/sleep music has always been far superior to his more "mundane" music, and Atlas Dei (2007), a collaboration with video artist Daniel Colvin, is no exception. It easily dwarfs all the albums of the previous five years. For an album that is a remix of music from previous albums (Sunyata, Gaud¡, Troubled Resting Place, Below Zero, Echo of Small Things, Electric Ladder), it also sounds magically cohesive, like a 66-minute eight-movement symphony. The revolving cloud of padded drones, the blurred echoes of monastic bells, the light bursts of natural sounds, the undercurrents of galactic void attain both a transcendent and a rationalist quality that strikes a surgical balance of Rich's varied background. Each piece is crafted from assembling new material and manipulating old material (sometimes up to three pieces).

Eleven Questions (Unsung, 2007), a collaboration of Markus Reuter, contains 13 brief post-ambient vignettes for guitar, piano, flute, vocals and percussion straddling the border between digital soundsculpting, free jazz and dissonant chamber music. The idea is very intriguing, but none of the tracks lasts long enough to fully exploit it.

Illumination (2007) was conceived as the soundtrack to a Michael Somoroff installation. There are moments that compare well with Rich's major releases. The slow sci-fi drones Point Line Plane (16:52) exude a sense of marvel in the presence of magic mixed with an ominous feeling due to the bass frequencies. The bottom layer of Curtain (15:43) floats in interstellar void while while the top layer is scorched by a burping turbulence Plato's Cave (14:10) mixes a digital processing of voices with a foggy and rumbling electronic wind.

Ylang (2010) resurrected the mellow new-age style of the 1980s, with flutes, guitar, bass, cello, violin, piano and ethnic instruments wrapped into ethereal waves of synthesizers and paced by the most linear drumming of his solo career; all for a program of humble impressionistic vignettes. Hence the languid guitar melodies of Ambergris and Tamarack. The elegy Attar weds exotic flute, Indian drumming and jazzy piano, but Kalyani and Charukesi are amateurish imitations of Indian music, and much of this album is tedious facile dejavu world-music, and the members of the ensemble sound under-utilized.

Medicine Box (2011) continued in that radio-friendly vein with arrangements that mimic electronic dance music of the time, yielding more or less evocative vignettes like Alba and Macula, the harmonica-tinged cinematic shuffle Cornea, and the angelic chant Kaaruwana. The more ambitious compositions are at the end: the shamanic overtones of Salamander Quay and the eleven-minute quasi-psychedelic trip of Helios inject the right amount of exotic elements into a more balanced rhythmic base.

Nest (2012) returned to his early experiments of integrating peaceful natural sounds with soothing electronic sounds. Piano, flute, guitar and bells weave the delicate filigrees of Memories Of Wandering (in two parts). The even more spiritual Moss Carpet Sky Blanket is a slowly revolving "om", and the even more delicate Generosity Of Solitude (in two parts) is worthy of Harold Budd's ambient music. Nostalgia breaks down in ecstatic awe when the drones become the dilated laments of Seeking Eden (possibly the standout), where lugubrious and psychedelic atmospheres meet. The album ends with the 14-minute duet for crickets and piano of Memories Of Home, drowning inside a dark cloud of drones.

Frozen Day (2013), one of the most creative works of this phase, compresses down to one hour 24 hours of chronological field recordings. It begins as a very dark wind that turns into an alien signal and then into a pulsing atomic monster and then into something like the rumble of echoes inside a tunnel, but with macabre overtones, and it ends with a hiss that fades away (as human civilization disappears into another night).

Morphology (2013) documents a live performance, one of his many live albums. A Scattering Time (2013) digs up a 2000 recording session with Meridiem, aka Percy Howard.

Rich staged his first all-night "sleep concert" in decades in October 2013, at the Unsound Festival in Poland.

Perpetual (2014) is an eight-hour sequel to Somnium, divided into six 80-minute chunks for technical reasons.

The four-LP set Premonitions 1980-1985 (Vinyl on Demand, 2015) documents Rich's early ambient works and live performances from 1979-85.

Filaments (2015) indulges in strong electronic beats especially in the pounding eleven-minute Entangled and in the Terry Riley-esque ten-minute Telomere Less so in the eleven-minute Majorana. Generally speaking, this is facile progressive and cosmic music.

What We Left Behind (2016), ostensibly the soundtrack to a shamanic journey, is a return to Rich's most lyrical atmospheres. The nostalgic and dreamy Profligate Earth, the suspenseful Raku, the impressionistic Soft Rains Fall (in which female voices emulate the rain), represent more than a journey: they also represent the physical and psychological landscape of that journey. On the other hand, the jungle trance of Voice Of Rust and the floating nine-minute cosmic music of Aerial On Warm Seas connect seamlessly with the metaphysical realm. There is quite a bit of filler, and What We Left Behind embraces rhythm and melody to craft a radio-friendly tune, but this album is a worthy continuation of the program started in Nest.

Vestiges (2016) is de facto just one long delicate Zen-inspired ambient-psychedelic piece: drones evolve slowly, sounds of nature are embedded in colorful textures, timid piano notes percolate, transparent filigrees flutter and glide, ghostly voices whisper... the musical equivalent of Monet's "Nympheas" and the ideal soundtrack to an undersea documentary. The nine-minute section Equipoise And Dissolution weaves together, in slow motion, echoes of otherworldly voices and ancestral flute evocations. The 16-minute Anchorless On Quiet Tide begins like a graceful neoclassical sonata but ominous winds rise from all directions creating an increasingly horror atmosphere. The 15-minute section Spectre Of Lost Light is particularly evocative. It begins like a whirlwind of dead leaves from whose vortex a magical light appears sprinting towards a distant galaxy, becoming a universal "om" intersected by flocks of interstellar signals which, after further sonic adventures, disintegrates into a wavering black hole. This album is his best since Seven Veils, not counting the monolith Somnium.

Lift a Feather to the Flood (2017) was a collaboration with guitarist Markus Reuter.

Sleep Concert at Gray Area (2018) documents a "sleep concert" of almost eight hours. Flood Expeditions (2018) documents a live performance with Markus Reuter during which Rich played the piano.

Rich appropriated technique and atmospheres of musique concrete on The Biode (2018) and wed them to production methods of the contemporary electronic dance scene. It is therefore an album of rhythm and dissonance, of hyperbass and warped vocals, closer in spirit and in sound to instrumental hip-hop music than to ambient music. What stands out is, above all, the crystalline timbres of the production. When a narrative ambition takes over, like in Protista Mephista (8:21), the result is eerily reminiscent of an electronic version of the prog-rock suites of the 1970s. Elevate the Hive Mind (7:28) has a shamanic and jazzy flavor. The fusion of ambient and dance elements yields hybrid morphing constructions like Galvanic Response (8:29), hedonistic versions of his traditional organic music.

The double-disc Tactile Ground (2019) is not only a pensive and introspective work but also a virtuosistic production that demands listening in surround sound mode as there are infinite elusive details that turn these philosophical meditations into sonic adventures. (The credits on the CD mention "Using synthesis technology, Old Crow, STG, L-1, Intellijel, Sequential PX & P12, Haken Continuum, LeafAudio Soundbox, lap steel, flutes, piano, odds & ends"... and then processed with sound design software like 2C Audio and Audio Damage). Like the previous albums, each disc of Tactile Ground (2019) is truly a one-hour long composition, divided into sections only for consumable convenience. The opening, The Sentience of Touch (9:02), feels like a neoclassical composition for piano and strings but it is alive with a background of crackling fire, wind chimes, gloomy drones and who knows what else. Elsewhere there are fairy-tale atmospheres wrapped in mysterious winds, like Eroding Columns (7:58), droning masses of grave suspense like Haptic Incursions (9:14), and eerily stately cosmic piano elegies like Shrouded Latice (9:19). Inevitably with such a colossal undertaking, the music is sometimes meandering and sometimes redundant. By comparison, Vestiges boasted a surgical precision in the way the compositions were edited. Here sections like Language of Breezes (14:29) are left to drift and repeat, and appropriately this section simply fades away, the whole section being just that, a slow process of falling asleep. And several sections simply reenact Robert Rich-ian cliches, leaving mostly a sense of dejavu.

Offering to the Morning Fog (2020), another album that is truly just one 67-minute composition (for flute and electronics), indulges in anemic languor and suffers from excessive repetition. It is difficult to tell the difference between the flute patterns of Distant Traveler and those of Cantus for Hospitality. Those of Awake When Shadows Walk are a bit more alive, but catatonic sections like Fall Up the Clouds Will Catch You hardly justify their duration. It sounds like a hastily produced work and it could have been trimmed down to 20 minutes without losing much.

Neurogenesis (2021) contains compositions for analog and digital synthesizers in just intonation. The nine-minute Neurogenesis and the eight-minute Convergent sound like algorithmic music, a mathematical version of Terry Riley's spiritual Rainbow in Curved Air, with fibrillating cascading chromatic timbres that overflow the auditory system. A sort of spiritual ecstasy is hinted in the angelic drones of Erinacea and in the quasi-ambient background of the eight-minute Connective.

Collaborations included Lift a Feather to the Flood (2017), again with Markus Reuter, Precambrian (2019), with Sverre Johansen, and For Sundays When It Rains (2022), with Luca Formentini. Oculus, formed by keyboardist Markus Reuter with violinist David Cross, bassist Fabio Trentini, drummer Asaf Sirkis, guitarist Mark Wingfield and Robert Rich, debuted with Nothing Is Sacred (2020).

Travelers' Cloth (2023) was inspired by Daoist writings.

Waves of Now (2024) is a live recording of a performance with Steve Roach.

Cloud Ornament (2024) documents a collaboration with Luca Formentini.

Long Tail of the Quiet Gong (2024) was conceived for a psychology experiment to observe the effects of music on dreams.

In 2024 Rich published his first book of poetry, "Bird Servant".

May We Find Our Way (2025) is a 95-minute stream of consciousness.

Incubation (2025) documents a collaboration with Markus Reuter.