Rapoon
Time Frost

THE REVIEW

Robin Storey (Aka Rapoon, Ex Zoviet France) starts from these premises: a new Ice Age has enveloped the whole of Europe in the cold and pale white of snow that cannot melt, this new desolately frozen landscape becomes a state of mind, and the state of mind rendered so immutable transforms into sound, a sound so cold that it manages to communicate intensely pure emotions. It's like when you touch a piece of ice with bare skin; after an initial sensation of cold, if you keep touching it, it burns. The same thing happens with this music: if listened to superficially, they are nothing but a slow background during a winter afternoon of study. If you totally open up to the album by listening to it lying in bed, with headphones, the volume at full blast and eyes closed, you become captivated and glimpse a parallel world that makes you forget you are in this world.

Even if the listener does not realize it, each of the 5 tracks of "Time frost" (released in 2007, Italian label Glacial Movements) starts with a fragment of The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss, but don't expect to recognize melodies or harmonies of that Waltz (Waltz? Are you kidding?), because Rapoon evokes an infinitesimal passage only to transport it among synthetic clouds, exhaust it with reverbs and delays of all kinds, and annul any semblance of rhythm, if not that of the loop that returns and returns each time changed in tones, and even more immobile. Thus, if in the two initial tracks ("Glacial Danube" and "Thin Light") the original sound of the orchestra is still traceable, already with "A darkness of snow" and "Horizon Discrete" the timbres are made totally unrecognizable and dark, and you are overwhelmed by a feeling of emptiness, as if no temporal dimension existed within the music anymore. The power of these drones is such that it makes you forget even about your life, so that realizing at the end of the 34 minutes of "Ice Whispers" that you are still on a continent without frost, that outside it’s even 15 degrees (not below zero?), that you still have a job, that there is a family, and that you need to go to the bathroom to pee, returning to the reality of all these very normal things can represent a strong trauma. So you dive back under the covers, turn off the light, close your eyes, and start this non-journey again.

It is incredible how for many now the ambient music has not remained just a background as Eno conceived it, or a tool for relaxation; in some respects, through its development with drones and dark atmospheres, it has definitively become THE music with which to lose oneself, become estranged, unthink.