Markus Reuter & Robert Rich
Eleven Questions

Why are the questions eleven, as the title suggests, while the answers, or hypothetical ones, thirteen (as many as the tracks included in the album) we are not told. What is certain is that everything was born from the collaboration of Markus Reuter (touch guitars, acoustic guitar, piano) and Robert Rich (sound design, piano, flutes, lap steel), along with the occasional contribution of SiRenée on vocals, during a week of work at the Soundscape studio in California.

If Rich requires no introduction, let's say that Reuter has become known for his participation in projects like Centrozoon and Tuner, but it's worth emphasizing how the two, when they found themselves working together, did not just try to combine their individual strengths and respective knowledge, but embarked on composing an album that was not necessarily bound to their past. Thus emerged a hypothetical soundtrack for a film where the narrative of metropolitan unease, the sense of naturalistic, solitary, and melancholic isolation, and images of men abandoned in space following a failed and unrecovered mission (with the load of lucid despair that this generates) alternate without precise rules. This leads the album to transit through different musical phases, often ambient, ethno/futuristic and on the brink of meditative new age, but also ethereal, electro-acoustic, synthetic and analog, hypnotic, cosmic (echoes of German sounds from the '70s emerge) and even subdued electro wave.

The overall tone is a little too subdued and differences struggle to emerge, but perhaps the intent of the two artists was precisely to give cohesion to the pieces through a peaceful and relaxed exploratory feel.