Your music often guides listeners into meditative or hypnagogic states — yet you don’t rely on traditional tools like binaural beats. What compositional elements do you find most effective for shifting perception or calming the nervous system?
RR: First of all: I don’t think “binaural beats” are traditional tools at all, but in fact more of a gimmick. I remember back in the 1980s when the Monroe Institute was promoting this idea, and we looked at it in the psychophysiology lab at Stanford University. Just because the brain can mirror the beat frequencies in the music by amplifying its own EEG in those regions doesn’t mean that those imposed frequencies are doing the same thing as when the brain does it endogenously.
The compositional elements that I rely on go back to the origins of trance music: drone, patterned rhythmic cycles, ecstatic melody. Listen to all the traditions of sacred and ecstatic music throughout the world, learn from them, respect and adapt the methods or styles that you find most appropriate, the sounds that move you personally as an artist. Summarizing these vocabularies would require scanning the full scope of human history.
Do you think “healing” is a meaningful concept in the context of your music, or do you see the listener’s response as more open-ended and subjective?
RR: I think the listener’s response is open-ended and subjective, but that doesn’t mean that expectation and setting don’t assist. Context means a lot. Intention means a lot. Communicating the intention clearly, and helping the listener create a good environment to listen can add a lot to the experience. I tend to be rather skeptical about any claims to “healing music” but I think that people can direct their own process of healing through the music they love, and other things that work, including western medicine.
When you’re composing long-form or sleep-oriented works, how do you structure time? What does pacing or temporal stretch mean in your creative process?
RR: Duration is intuitive. I use myself as a guide. If I start getting bored, I ask if there should be a change to make it more interesting, or perhaps I have too many elements going on and it could be more interesting if more empty. Intention plays a big role, and the way the people might listen to the music, in context. In the sleep works specifically, I try to avoid exact repetition, preferring fluid forward flow. I tend to structure sections in approximate 90 minute segments to echo the REM cycle, but I don’t expect to time the cycle exactly, as everyone will be in a different phase. Therefore I ty to keep the flow constant and the changes as gradual as possible. Also I think in terms of the energy of the times in the morning. Things get most quiet around 3:00-5:00 am for example, but they have to ramp up very slowly after that so things don’t get too loud to wake people. Like duration, this energy flow is intuitive.
Your integration of field recordings often feels inseparable from the musical elements. How do you treat these natural sounds — as instruments, atmospheres, metaphors, or something else?
RR: I like the way that the environmental sounds relocate my sense of place. These aren’t metaphors so much as purely sensual feeling of location. I record my own environmental sounds, and manipulate them until they affect me emotionally or pull into the soundstage, enveloping the space. I want to invite the world into my music as a collaborator.
In works like Rainforest or Nest, there’s a deep ecological sensibility. How much does your relationship with the natural world influence your approach to sound design and ambient composition?
RR: The natural world is the most important awareness for me and my music. These elements are inseparable. I prefer to develop sounds (whether electronic or acoustic) so they feel organic, complex and earthy. Often this involves subverting the electronic nature of the non-acoustic sounds, to help them fit in.
How do you preserve the emotional or spatial integrity of field recordings in the mix, especially when blending them with synthesized or processed sounds?
RR: I don’t attempt to preserve their integrity. I manipulate the recordings until they evoke a new feeling. These are an integral part of the sculpted space. But first I start with recordings that evoke what the music is asking.
How do you approach the illusion of depth, distance, and internal space in your soundscapes?
RR: There is no single technique here. If I could use words to describe it, they would ignore the decades of experiential and sensory learning that don’t translate very well into words. It involves an awareness of the many ways that sound can move between speakers or in headphones. Phase relationships, microphone patterns, delays and reverberation, knowing how to place certain sounds behind or in front of others, not just left and right. Some of the classic elements of orchestration also play a role, although they mutate a bit when applied to electronic sounds. In terms of the nature recordings, sometimes they serve an important role of adding “air” to a soundscape, opening up the frequency spectrum, taking the walls and roof away from the recording. I like that feeling.
Many describe your music as immersive or even “embodied.” Do you think of the auditory field as something that interacts with the body as much as with the mind?
RR: Absolutely. I have been using the term “embodiment” for years to differentiate our sense of physicality from the increasingly abstracted technologies promoted in gaming or virtual reality. I want my music somehow to remind people of their existence as animals, in a body, mortal, not just some artificial construct of mind. Our best understandings of animal intelligence (our own, for example) show that sensory integration might be essential for actual consciousness (sentience) as opposed to the illusion of sentience projected by current AI. Our mind is not just in our brain, but integrated throughout our nervous system, and who knows, perhaps even our environment.
You’ve long worked with alternative tunings and microtonality. Do you think these subtle shifts in pitch language affect listeners in ways they may not consciously register?
RR: I think that just intonation gives us a wider vocabulary of harmony that can express moods extending beyond what the chords in Equal Temperament express. It’s like a painter who only had a handful of pigments who gets introduced to the full spectrum or colors and beyond. Imagine you have been painting only with Cobalt blue your whole life, and then someone brings you a bottle of phthalo blue. Suddenly your vocabulary of blue increases.
Are there specific textures or timbral qualities you return to when trying to create a calming, introspective, or inward-moving space for the listener?
RR: I confess I am not necessarily trying to create a calming space. Often I want my music to create energy inside a listener when they pay more intention. I don’t really try to create any specific mood, to be honest. Often, the music will guide me toward a mood or energy that surprises me, a feeling that I didn’t expect. In general, I am attracted most strongly to instrumental elements that have a vocal quality. I might use flute or guitar, or some other method to get an extra level of expression in whatever lead melodic voice I want to use. I find that the liquid, flexible nature of the voice tends to focus our attention in interesting ways: of course because we are language-based and use our voices intensely for communication, so our brains are wired for it. If I choose not to have a lead melody, that might serve the purpose of making music that is more in the background, which also serves a purpose.
Ambient music often leaves space for emotional ambiguity, while healing music may aim for a more direct emotional effect. Do you ever feel a tension between these two approaches — and how do you balance openness with intention in your work?
RR: Most of my music is not intended for “healing” so I don’t feel a conflict with those elements you mention. I tend to focus on what the music is asking me to do. Before anything else I want the music to have energy, some sense of piquant meaningfulness. Usually (for me) this entails a bittersweet feeling of honesty about existence. I don’t know how to explain the way this translates into music, specifically, except perhaps that I am somewhat allergic to “pretty” or “nice” and tend towards something that shows a deeper meaning through shadows and chiaroscuro. I like it when the music scratches a bit, and gets under the skin with questions, not answers.
In your view, what distinguishes ambient music that endures and supports deep listening from work that fades into background utility?
RR: This answer is probably almost identical to my previous answer. If music is going to last, it needs to make us itch. It needs to embrace both shadows and light.
Are there particular composers, traditions (e.g., gamelan, minimalism, electroacoustic), or philosophies that have shaped your own approach to composing immersive or meditative works?
RR: Yes, of course! So many. North Indian classical music (Hariprasad Chaurasia for example), Terry Riley, Popul Vuh, Cluster, Pauline Oliveros, Jon Hassel, Javanese court gamelan, Hamza el Din, Djivan Gasparian… it’s a long list. Philosophicaly, all of the traditions that attempt to reduce our sense of ego and enhance our ability to feel the flow of the verb of existence.
If a new composer were exploring how to shape perceptual or contemplative states through sound — without falling into clichés — what advice would you give them?
RR: Use yourself in your most unguarded states to listen to your work from the outside-in, to understand from a listener’s mind whether your work does what you hope it to do. Use yourself as a litmus test to learn if you are achieving your goal, and iterate your work to satisfy yourself (as “other”) as a listener. Compose as a listener not as a maker. Another aspect of this process, much harder to describe: Allow the music to form within itself as if it exists as a living entity. It’s not what “you” want to make, it’s what wants “you” to make it. Listen to the music tell you what needs to come forward. If you listen well, something can happen that is better than your everyday self, it is using you to make something real that did not previously exist.
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