Vestiges
RELEASED: November 17, 2016
ARTIST: Robert Rich
LABEL: Soundscape
CATALOGUE NUMBER: SP029
NUMBER OF DISCS: 1
Vestiges

If you are interested in a 5.1 channel high resolution surround version, you can purchase surround downloads from the Surround Music One link above.

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Adrift on slack tide
Trending out into the vestiges
of fading light
The night that dawns knows nothing
of this passing thought
Quietly slipping past the buoys
Ever farther from shore’s embrace

Robert Rich – MOTM and Euro modular, Haken Continuum, Piano,
DSI Prophet 12 and 6, lap steel guitar, Ocarina, PVC flutes.
Chari Chuang – Voice clouds on 3, 4
Dimitris Menexopoulos – Lyra clouds on 3
Recorded in 2016 at Soundscape Mountain View
Composed, Mixed and Mastered by Robert Rich

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Here is a review from Sonic Immersion by Bert Strolenberg:

“Vestiges” began as the unspoken corollary to the strong concept album “What We Left Behind” and proves even more up close and personal. While traveling forward in his own imagination to experience the earth after human extinction, Robert Rich needed to push aside the brooding sense of melancholy and unfulfilled promise that accompanies thoughts of our own end. Well, “Vestiges” explores those feelings without apology, finding catharsis in the melancholy that hovers behind its predecessor … What initially starts out from a dense and dark place transforms slowly into a next level of emotive, organic-flavored and desolate soundscapes growing tenderer and reconciled as a kind of catharsis while facing the inevitable. It reaches a first highlight and transition on the mesmerizing intense “Spectre of Lost Light” where things dissolve in unity in the end. Immersion is deepened again on the hypnotizing textural “Obscured by Leaf Shadows” and “Equipoise and Dissolution”. Both velvet aural perfumes feel like a hallucinogenic and surreal desolate journey beyond. Toward the end, the solitary journey we all have to make seems to dwell on effortless, descending imminently into far-off, misty borderlands and ghostly plains on “Anchorless on Quiet Tide”. It was no repose or release I felt at the end but a brooding vast journey of darker sonic surrealism carrying on elsewhere. It makes “Vestiges” an in-depth and most compelling listening experience for all of us confronted with reality and what lies beyond.

Part of the review by Darren Bergstein on Igloo.
(Full Article Here)

The opening clutch of pieces, blending together in a starkly wrought triptych, establishes the album’s tracking shot: smoky, barren landscapes, the whisper of toothless fauna scuttling about, darkly synthetic winds blowing over environs of apocalyptic aftermath in epic lament. Never shy about depicting such bleak atmospheres, the acts of archetypal solace underpinning Rich’s cinematic contours drawn across Vestiges is the leftover mist arising from the first breaths taken on Premonitions, further expounded upon and realized with three-decade hindsight. Rich’s aural poetry is as poignantly reflected in his track titling. “Obscured by Leaf Shadows” posits ceremonial shakers behind contemplative, Budding piano and stricken, whitewashed synths that characteristically shift and eddy behind a metronomic burst of EMP bass pulse. “Equipoise and Dissolution” further extends the ominous metaphors of some unnamed cataclysm bridging worlds past and future, mysterious voices flittering just out of earshot amidst Rich’s trademark manmade flutes and wild-eyed electronics. The finale, nicked with the Dylan Thomas-esque title “Anchorless on Quiet Tide,” is a sixteen-minute edict of tranquility and pause, as Rich’s emotive and sparse piano notes lay adrift in a new-dawn thrush of soft-spoken, whispery tones. Rarely does electronic, née ‘ambient’, music connect two apposite poles with such a gripping statement of intent and become all the Richer for it.

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