The Wire Article

 They filmed this one Chinese monk who lived alone half way up a mountain, says Robin Storey, remembering some early TV footage documenting a performance of Chinese sacred music. He was playing a three-stringed harp and the song was over 3000 years old, but it was so pure and elemental that it seemed to contain everything around it. It was utterly stunning.

On the recording, of our phone conversation, Storey's voice, which you suspect is naturally reserved anyway and always pitched just above the listening threshold, is barely audible through the hiss of tape static. Like the music of that anonymous Chinese monk, the records Storey has made under the name Rapoon (last years Vernal Crossing and the new Fallen Gods) can also sound as if they contain the various worlds that surround them.

The voice rises out of the static again. Things had started to fall apart internally. Storey is referring to the moment in 1992 when he ceased working with the members of that legendary Industrialist group :zoviet*france:, which he had been part of since 1980. I'd always been interested in ethnic music's and exploring aspects of rhythms as well as sound, which wasn't really possible in :zoviet*france:.

Hence Rapoon. On Fallen Gods, Storey takes recordings of the live improvisations he produces using his extensive collection of Asian and North and West African instruments - hand drums, harps, thumb pianos, ancient flutes - then samples, loops and filters these tapes through analogue sound processors to produce long, fluting mantras for Off World nomads.

Storey lives in Newcastle but grew up on the Scottish borders. He says he has a distant memory of hearing Scottish plain chant for the first time and being struck by how simple and fundamental it sounded. Those are the qualities I want to achieve in Rapoon.

article by Tony Herrington

This text originally appeared in The Wire magazine (issue # 133).

Reproduced by permission.

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