Robert Rich & Markus Reuter
Incubation

When Markus stayed with us for a week, after one of his tours got cancelled, we improvised together for hours each day. We recorded our experiments, and we puzzled over the hovering nocturnal mood of our explorations. Of course we were channeling the situation of our lives and of the world, perhaps a dissonance between the realms of comfort and distress, distance from family or a larger distance from our hopes for the human herd.

As artists, we take a shamanic path, and we trend toward the outlying regions of cognition. Our musical mood during these sessions reminded me of the books by Peter Kingsley, about pre-Socratic mystics Parmenides and Empedocles, who’s meditative approach of “incubation” planted a more earthy and subterranean core to ancient European philosophy. Consider this musical excursion as subterranean, seeking balance inside of dark silence. Markus and I share a deep friendship based on searching, questioning, practice, and a sort of alchemical process of creating things that never existed before, from within our life journeys.

01 Erased In Shadow 4:25
02 Forms Still Linger 6:18
03 Spirits Summoned 4:42
04 Known Without Seeing 5:52
05 Phosphenes Remain 6:54
06 Eidetic Sustain 5:33
07 Clay Between Fingers 5:28
08 Invisible Lightning 7:16
09 Forgotten Creatures 4:40
10 At Odds with Survival 4:38
11 To Find What’s Missing 4:03
12 Orpheus Glances Back 3:47

Total Time: 63:37

©2025 by Robert Rich, BMI (IPI 00205516302)
and Markus Reuter, SESAC (IPI 00290656643)
Published by Amoeba Music, BMI (IPI: 00235480475)
and All Matter In The Universe, SESAC  (IPI: 1035163003)

Recorded in July and August 2025 at Soundscape, Carmel
Markus Reuter: Touch Guitar and looping systems
Robert Rich: Sequential PX, Haken Continuum,
piano, flutes, lap steel guitar, sound design
Mixed and Mastered by Robert Rich August 2025

We printed a limited run of 300 CDs in Europe. 120 should arrive in the USA in mid-December. Order CDs through the Bandcamp link. European orders will be fulfilled by MoonJune in Spain. USA orders will be filled by Robert Rich.

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A Review from Chuck van Zyl/STAR’S END 11 December 2025:

With each successive collaboration Robert Rich & Markus Reuter move closer to the voices coaxing them from the wilderness. The dreamy nocturnal poetry of their Incubation (63:34) seems lit from within. Conveying delight, wonder and nostalgia it feels rooted equally in memory and imagination. For those willing to follow the music this album will take you places more common Ambient rarely goes. With understated precision our duo utilizes digital, electronic, and acoustic sources to create realizations so human and surreal. Enchanting across all 12 tracks Incubation resists scientific readings. Distinctively luxuriant, it means to darken not dispel. As moonlight heightens a sense of seduction Rich & Reuter invite the listener to invent a narrative, and leave ample room for mental creation and flights of fancy. While Reuter’s fine lead lines offer a still center, Rich’s vividly expressive timbres and tones expand such sonic dimensions and scale. Suggesting, but not telling a story these companions craft with remarkable freedom. Do the flutes, piano, synths and guitar belong to the musicians, or to our dreams? Where uncoiling snakes carry menace the aural landscape is imbued with a fascinating luminosity and strangeness – culminating in a beautifully abundant realm of sound. In such moments we sense the source of a mysterious power. From its wandering focus and doomed hopefulness, to a bracing immediacy and the lingering consolation of the spirit we recognize that Incubation is not so unearthly, as it is wholly of our world – of its lesser known, but more mystical, magical regions.