There always seems to be, in the music of Rapoon, something that is always just beyond your grasp. Like in a dream – something your mind desires to know but remains impossible to fully conceptualize. “These are dreams,” says the man sampled on the first track of this new album. “They’re not yours.”
Robin Storey deserves a book, and it should be a richly illustrated one because he also is a very fine graphic artist, a fact attested to by his lively cover art and many gallery exhibits. After departing Zoviet France – the ultimately amorphous audio collective he helped found – Storey immediately staked out his own, uncanny territory, debuting as Rapoon in 1992. That was a good hundred releases or so ago. While this massive body of work has on occasion excoriated Western warrior mentality or glanced wistfully upward at unidentified aerial phenomena, for most Rapoon is synonymous with a dusky, suggestive soundscape heaving with atmosphere and propelled by quasi-ethnic rhythms.
For avid listeners, These are Dreams should provoke a sense of nostalgia. As Storey continues to evolve and thrive (lately as part of the new-old trio Old Castle), the music on this album, though recorded over the latest few years, is steeped in the tradition of The Kirghiz Light, Easterly 6 or 7 and The Fires of the Borderlands. Each track percolates with rhythm and bristles with the voices of scary choirs, bemused innocents and assertive savants. Regardless of the number of years gone by, Rapoon continues to stir dreams on the murky borderland of nightmare.
Stephen Fruitman
Avant Music News 