A collaboration of sound & image
music by Robert Rich
photos by David Agasi

A limited production of 129 custom boxes containing offset prints of ten photographs by David Agasi on heavy matte fibre acid-free paper, a signed and numbered page with artists’ statements, and CD of music by Robert Rich. The CD alone is available without the prints with photos replicated inside the booklet.

Credits

Recorded August 2004-February 2005.
Instruments include MOTM modular, TimewARP 2600,
Sculpture, lap steel guitar, flutes, small things.
Logical thanks to Jeff Taylor-Cross at Apple.
Engineered by Robert Rich at Soundscape Studio.
© 2005 by Robert Rich, Published by Amoeba Music BMI.
Layout by Jeff Kowal

Song List

Pathways 9:36
Fences 4:57
Circle Unwound 9:00
Passing Terrain 6:09
Glint in Her Eyes 6:25
Scent of Night Jasmine 9:09
Summer Thunder 4:27
Hollow Rings Longer 5:19
Weightless Morning 6:12

Longtime friends Agasi and Rich inspire each other with image and sound. Ten of Agasi’s haunting sensual photos unite with Rich’s calm reflective soundscapes in this unique creative meeting, focusing eye and ear on the beauty of the intimate and peripheral.

Artists’ Comments:

Our culture helps determine for us what we think is important and what we think is trivial, what is large and what is small. Yet meaning often waits at the periphery. Life happens in the gaps, in the soft-hued colors of the mundane, the accidental: a casual smile, the cycle of seasons, the view from a window, growing a garden, the smells and fabrics of home.

Often I value the everyday moments in life more than the grand statement. I try to reflect the beauty and depth of those small things that we stop seeing. I want to create experiences that heighten attention through rarefaction, to subtract until I can expose an essential truth.

David Agasi and I decided to collaborate after many years of friendship, and the title “Echo of Small Things” came from an effort to describe a common theme that unites us. David focuses his camera at a human scale: peripheral, with an almost accidental intimacy; myopic, exposing the quiet gaps between love and loneliness; warm, ripe with sensitivity and soft humor.

Robert Rich, Mountain View, CA USA
February 2005

On our daily merry-go-round, every turn can make the world look different than it did before. Relationships change or filter out with no warning, buildings are bulldozed as others rise in their place, seasonal clouds shift through the sky, and with them all definition of solid ground.

I find things by being lost. They come into my lens-net on lures I do not bait. The people and animals residing around us hold their own suggestive power; so do those objects considered dead or inanimate. By making photographs, amuck and without premeditation, I find meaning in the poetry of the everyday. I need no certainty of destination. I like to uncork secrets while sliding things softly off the frame, so you’ll wonder where they’ve gone.

Robert’s sounds can only be described as organic, regardless of source material. His understanding of the cyclical and perpetual in nature never ceases to astound. Listening to these tactile excavations, we can emerge with a resounding artifact: a gift of memory, or memory misplaced. By sharing our ideas and feelings, we rekindle our love of restless beauty, of what lies buried beyond the next sweet and perilous curve.

David Agasi, Tokyo, Japan
February 2005