Robert Rich

Bay Area ambient pioneer Robert Rich began building his own synthesizer at the age of 13, around the same time he became interested in avant-garde and minimal composition. By the time he got to college at Stanford (around 1981), he began organizing “sleep concerts,” playing abstract drones and soundscapes to influence audiences’ REM cycles.

In his 2014 Red Bull Music Academy lecture, he discussed music as ritual, modular synths, mastering advice, magic, sampling tree frogs, and psytrance raves, among many other things.

Hosted by Todd L. Burns Transcript:

Todd L. Burns

I wanted to say hello to one of my musical heroes, and to the lecture couch at the Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo. His name is Robert Rich. And we were listening to some of his stuff just now. That was “Perpetual”?

Robert Rich

Yep. It’s an eight-hour piece that’s based on the sleep concerts, like the one I’ll be playing tonight.

Todd L. Burns

Tell us about these sleep concerts, ’cause we’re going to have some ambient bed music for the entire talk.

Robert Rich

Well, the sleep concert started, first one was when I was a freshman in college around 1982. It was in January, and I had been trying for at least a year or so to figure out how to define a musical direction for what interested me in my musical voice, my direction. The things that interested me were how music could be used as a ritual device or a shamanic community-building tool. Thinking about the ways that music might’ve started archaeologically, and in the earliest memories of human consciousness as language was taking shape in our brains, it’s most likely that forms of communication were coming out in ways with early musical forms as well as with words. In Paleolithic sites, there’s instruments that include stones that were obviously hit and tuned. There’s bone pipes with holes in them that are hollow. One of the oldest human musical instruments is from the bone of an ostrich. It’s a flute that goes back about 30,000 years. 30,000 years! Which is about when Cro-Magnon man was probably intermating with Neanderthals in Europe.

Todd L. Burns

So we’re really starting from the beginning here?

Robert Rich

[laughs]Yes, yes. My question then was, “How do I define what my purpose is as a musician?” I was 18-years-old, intellectually inclined in college, wanting to change the world, wanting to do something with my life. And although I never went to art school, what I always thought should happen in art school is that people should be encouraged to define their purpose. As that soon as a direction has a clear reason, it has the “why,” then the “how” follows. I was looking for the “why.” After thinking about what other people had been doing with duration, with ritual, with trance, and repetition and long form of music, I thought that, there was this idea that came to me that I could play all night long and invite people to come and bring a pillow, sleeping bag and encourage them to dream with the music.

Todd L. Burns

Why sleep, though? Obviously, most performers want people to very actively hear the music.

Robert Rich

That’s a really good question, and there’s probably layers to that. I think one ironic or self-defeating part of it might have been that I was inclined towards very slow, deep music and film and everything. My favorite art was minimal and sparse. I can talk later about why I think that’s important. But a lot of other people would find it boring. I would find that the boredom factor was one of the distinguishing things of what made me interested in something. What made other people not like it. And so I thought, “Well, how do I get people to be in the same place for a long period of time without expectation of surprise? Without expectation of entertainment so that they could start looking inside of themselves and find what’s interesting inside.” I think for me the realization was that that differentiation between boredom and entertainment was that I always had a whole world of things to explore. And when a stimulus was very rarefied, I would explode with ideas; other people would just get really bored and go off and want more stimulus. The sleep idea wasn’t so much that I wanted them to be asleep to my music. In fact, you don’t sleep as deeply in a sleep concert. You sleep rather poorly. There’s many reasons for that. One is that physiology becomes activated, and just your own heartbeat, your breath speeds up when other people are in the room with you. When you’re alone, you tend to relax. That causes you to sleep less well as well. The other thing was simply to get people to be in the same place for a very long period of time so that they could start experiencing what music can do over a very long period. Because I have a short attention span, I wander around. I can’t sit still for more than about 20 minutes. This was a way to just give people permission to not concentrate, to give people permission to doze off, and to see if I could create a context for something magical or something communal.

Todd L. Burns

When you first did it, was it what you expected? Did you get exactly the sort of, “Oh, this is exactly what I thought this was going to be?” Or were there surprises?

Robert Rich

The very first one was… Hard to say what I knew to expect, it was a total experiment. It was in the lounge of my college dormitory. It was about this big and it had a natty carpet and an old piano in it. About 12 or 16 people showed up. I knew about half of them. I was amazed that there were at least eight or nine people that I didn’t know there. And, it was free. And it had a thick atmosphere and that was what I was looking for. What I couldn’t know, and what I still don’t know entirely, was what the audience was experiencing, and that’s the mystery of consciousness, isn’t it? The fact that we don’t really know what each other thinks or experiences. And so, for me, that has been one of the most interesting puzzles, because my experience of giving a sleep concert is probably very different from the experience of the people experiencing it.

Todd L. Burns

I mean, obviously the very obvious, you’re working and they’re not, so to speak.

Robert Rich

Yes. Exactly, yeah.

Todd L. Burns

What is it like for you specifically doing the sleep concert?

Robert Rich

Usually, there’s a point for the first 40 minutes or so, it’s fairly active. I’m just performing and I’m playing and listening to notes. Then there’s a certain point where it gets very, very slow and quiet. The room gets thick and the atmosphere gets sort of heavy. Then it’s interesting because I go into a place where I’m riding this very slow wave of energy, but then at a certain point, I get tired and I get bored as well. So there’s things where I’m trying to keep a continuum, a thread going, so that the experiences is fluid. Yet, I need to maintain a sort of level of concentration that becomes difficult for me especially when I’m tired. Often, it means getting up, going into the back, grabbing a tea. Going to the bathroom, coming and going more often. And then there’s periods of magic and concentration, and then periods where I’m just trying to keep it going. It’s the very frank and honest answer to it.

Todd L. Burns

What type of gear are you bringing to these things? I know you play, obviously you’re using synths. You also, in the past, have played flute as well?

Robert Rich

I have all those things here. Lap steel guitar with loopers and homemade flutes that are using PVC pipe, basically sprinkler pipe. Then a laptop running Ableton Live like everybody else in the world. [laughs] I have a funny story about Ableton with that but that was it to...

Todd L. Burns

What is that story?

Robert Rich

We were at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. This is about 2008, I think. And Robert Henke, who is the person who created Ableton, he conceptualized it. He doesn’t work for the company anymore, but it was his brainchild. He goes under the name Monolake as his music. We were backstage while, I think, Juan Atkins was playing. We were just noticing that Ableton was everywhere. Everybody had a Mac laptop running the same software at Detroit Electronic Music. Robert was feeling a little smug, and he puts his legs up and he goes, [strong German accent] “I think we have achieved 100% market saturation.” [laughter] “You know, this is not a very good thing. Where do you go?” [laughs] But it comes in really handy because what I can do then is create this long evolving textures that are 40 minutes, an hour long. I have them all as essentially, full-length files, and I mix them in and out in my play. I have access to hundreds of layers. I could probably give a concert for two days if I could pull it off. The idea is that it allows me a turntable or DJ setup with two dozen CD players, essentially.

Todd L. Burns

With the playing of live instruments, do you hold that back for 30 or 40 minutes while people are sleeping, or do you go directly into that?

Robert Rich

No, it comes and goes in waves. Usually, the first hour is more active, and there’s... One of the big influences in my music is Indian classical music, raga. Especially the beginning part of a raga, the alap. Although I’m not a formal student of Indian music, I’ve been around it a good part of my life in the Bay Area; San Francisco area has the Ali Akbar School of Music in the North, and a large South Indian population where I live in Silicon Valley. I have this wonderful access to the music of carnatic South Indian music and the Hindustani, North Indian Classical. That quality of drone and solo instrument and the way that modes are used in Indian music is a strong influence. I used that as a way to slowly weave a line of thought into the clouds of sounds that then take over. The flute and the guitar become like a voice. It’s just very slow.

Todd L. Burns

You grew up in San Francisco as well?

Robert Rich

South of there, yeah.

Todd L. Burns

Tell me, this is quite heady stuff for someone just entering college to be grappling with these questions already that you were just talking about earlier. How did we get there? How did you get to that place where you’re already thinking about these things?

Robert Rich

Well, someone in my age group was a little kid during the ‘60s and that was a big factor. I didn’t even know that it was at the time. I didn’t know what psychedelic meant when I was five. It turned out the Grateful Dead we’re practicing in a garage behind a cemetery where I was backing. They were about 200 meters from my backyard was the garage where the Grateful Dead were practicing, when they were called the Warlocks. And Ken Kesey’s bus was parked two blocks up the hill on Perry Street. There were riots going on at Stanford University in 1968. As a five-year-old, I’d ride my bike over there and really enjoy seeing all the naked hippies hanging around Lake Lagunita. First time, I saw naked adults cavorting. It was, of course, who’s not going to like that?

Todd L. Burns

I guess when that’s normal this is...

Robert Rich

[laughs] For me, it was very pleasant. One of the nice things about the San Francisco Bay Area is a lot of diversity, and a lot of openness to all types and all sorts of ideas. One of the things that really started shaping my musical language was a radio station called KPFA in Berkeley. That’s a listener-sponsored, very left-leaning free radio. During the ‘70s, the music director was a fellow named Charles Amirkhanian who himself is a respected sound poet. He was bringing all sorts of amazing composers around and exposing people to this new world of minimalism and tonal of avant-garde music.

Todd L. Burns

When you say “tonal avant-garde,” what is that mean exactly?

Robert Rich

To distinguish it from people like Milton Babbitt or Stockhausen which is more event-based and much more intellectual and more mathematical. People like La Monte Young, or Terry Riley, or Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood were doing this magical slow, focused... Deep listening was the phrase that Pauline Oliveros coined. And this idea, that comes from minimalist art, that art doesn’t have to be about the artist’s ego or the statement of changing the shape of art. Art can be about changing the shape of the person experiencing the art. It can be pointing away from the art itself and pointing back towards the experiencer. The beauty to me about minimalism was it’s not about repetition. I don’t use this phrase the way most musicians think of it in terms of Steve Reich or Philip Glass, or Terry Riley, this ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Minimalism in the sense of an artistic aesthetic of quietude and creating an evanescent, vague experience which disappears when you try to touch it. What that does when you confront this art, you confront yourself and the art points back to you like a mirror. That idea was very, very strong for me. I think with the kinds of composers that Amirkhanian was bringing, people like Terry Riley who was just a huge light and a beautiful energy of a person, I mean, he’s just this big-hearted guy, and his music shows that. It shows this love and ecstatic of feeling for the universe. I think when I refer to minimalism, I talk first about the movement which would be a return to tonality. Then the other half of it is art that points back to the listener. The return to tonality is very interesting because I also was moved by that to explore microtonal composition. That was also an influence from Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and all sorts of other, you know... Harry Partch was an American composer who was born in 1902 and died in 1974. He created a whole tuning system of 43 notes per octave and built all of his own instruments and created these events that were like Chinese opera mixed with Greek drama, with this crazy music. He was a complete outsider, but his music was hyper tonal, even though it was extremely threatening to people. Very, very strange music. The idea of finding new language within chords and within melody and not rejecting the way that emotion can be brought forth into music. That art music doesn’t have to be cold, it can be beautiful. Even that creating art that has gravitas or has importance doesn’t mean it has to be intellectual or fully austere or dealing with only the shadows of the world. It can also encompass these elements of life and light.

Todd L. Burns

It can also encompass life because I think...

Robert Rich

Whoa! And life encompasses death, doesn’t it?

Todd L. Burns

Of course.

Robert Rich

[laughs] It’s a full circle. Yeah, and so that aspect of being complete is very interesting to me.

Todd L. Burns

One of the other things that you said in the past that’s been an influence on you is just sounds in general, growing up, frogs, the sound of frogs, or crickets, or the wind.

Robert Rich

Absolutely. And I think I’ve said it many times, the frogs taught me polyrhythms. The way I hear syncopation is from the western tree frogs what we call the spring peepers. There is an aspect of my music which is a desire to return to a kind of Eden. It’s a metaphor for me, which is not an Eden in the bible or Eden in a garden, it’s a metaphor of Eden to a place of connection within the self. But nature for me is definitely an aspect of the way I hear sound and the way I hear music. I should probably back up a step and say I grew up in a household with my father was a jazz guitarist and so, he was into the West Coast cool school like Stan Getz and Barney Kessel. I grew up hearing that music as being Caucasian. Coming around the ‘60s, and for me it was all about Sun Ra and Chicago Art Ensemble and much more aggressive kind of weird stuff, Ornette Coleman. But my grandparents had this place that they had built a little house on a property with a creek running through it back in the 1920s. My grandparents passed away in the 1960s. Sometime around 1977, we moved to my grandparent’s place to take over the property and I was helping to keep the garden up and things. And that’s where I really found my language in the garden there. It’s very emotional for me, actually, because truly, my first recordings were at the creek that went around a big oak tree. And that recording ended up being the base of a piece that is on my first album called, “Oak Spirits.” It was quite literally an improvisation on modular synthesizer and a creek. [laughs] I was trying to find a way to use the sound of nature to be its own instrument, not to be an accompaniment to something that was like, well, what became a horrible cliché with this godawful relaxation music that was happening in the ‘80s.”

Todd L. Burns

It’s quite interesting that you always draw that distinction because I think a lot of people listening to some of the things that you do could very easily just lump it in there.

Robert Rich

Absolutely.

Todd L. Burns

You’re always very adamant that that’s the other stuff.

Robert Rich

I am. I think if you hear it, you hear it. You just know what I mean. For one thing is avoiding that cloying triadic harmony that just sounds like you’re imposing something upon the...

Todd L. Burns

“You will relax.”

Robert Rich

Yeah, oh god! It’s a funny thing. The fact that I would be using a vocabulary which is just inches away from something that turns my teeth on edge is ironic, isn’t it? For me, because the animals and the world around us has taught me how to listen to sound. I like to play duets with them yet it’s part of a language of trying to create a landscape, a surrealist landscape, that becomes dreamlike. Part of that is to use the nature sounds, manipulating them into a place where they become psychological, not photographic.

Todd L. Burns

Is there something we should play that maybe exemplifies that pretty well from what you have here?

Robert Rich

Sure. Actually, if... Let’s see. Could in fact play... Do you have “Sunyata” on there?

Todd L. Burns

Yeah. We do.

Robert Rich

Cool.

Todd L. Burns

“Oak Spirits,” I mean, why not?

Robert Rich

Instead of that, do you have Trances/Drones in there? Play “Sunyata (Emptiness),” if you have Trances/Drones. OK, this is actually on my first album and it’s layers of flute, my voice and the frogs in the rain, basically. It’ll take a while to build up because my music was very patient back then.

Todd L. Burns

Yeah. This track is 23 minutes long so we may be here a while.

[laughter]

Robert Rich

We could get a little more gain out of this? Thanks.

Robert Rich – “Sunyata (Emptiness)”

(music: Robert Rich – “Sunyata (Emptiness)”)

[comments] So perhaps people start to understand why I’m distinguishing it from the Brahms “Lullaby” with bird songs behind him.

Todd L. Burns

Another distinction that you constantly make is it’s not ambient. It’s deep listening. Sorry, a phrase that you like to describe what you do.

Robert Rich

I’m way more comfortable with ambient than the word that sounds like sewage, yeah. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there was really no way of putting what myself and other people in my little clique of friends that we’re doing stuff like this. Most of us are starting really solitary, this was after the German krautrock space music scene in the ‘70s. There really wasn’t any place for this kind of thing in the ‘80s. Most of us were working as hermits. As far as terminology goes, I’ve always liked Pauline’s approach with the word “deep listening.”

Todd L. Burns

That’s Pauline Oliveros.

Robert Rich

Pauline Oliveros, yeah. It refers to the listener, not to the sound. It’s almost a set of instructions saying, “Here’s how you can approach this. Here’s how you can get some nutrition out of it.” As opposed to saying, “Here’s what it resembles.” It avoids that problem that, for example, electronic dance music has run into, which is having to come up with a different subgenre every time somebody changes the BPM by five points. [laughter] “Oh, this is jungle.“ “No, it’s not. It’s gabber.” “This is psytrance.” “No, it’s dubstep.” Somebody changes the kick drum sample they use and they have to come up with a different term for it. It’s ridiculous. I think that the point of finding names for styles is degenerate, and it’s really a kind of way of not evaluating what the music is on its own. But the difficulty in trying to sell your music or to convey to people that they might be interested in it usually involves language at some level or another, even though the music itself might be trying to completely subjugate language or subvert language.

Todd L. Burns

One of the things that you just mentioned is that all of these people were working as hermits. There didn’t seem to be a community, but there was a radio show called Hearts of Space. That was a community in a way of these things.

Robert Rich

It was one guy, Steven Hill.

Todd L. Burns

Can you talk about what that is and how that played a role in your career?

Robert Rich

Yeah. Steven was another Bay Area installation. He came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972, I think, right out of architecture school in Pennsylvania and landed right in the post-hippie scene in San Francisco and started a radio show on KPFA. That same station, which I grew up listening to. He started in the ‘70s, he was on Thursday nights from eleven ‘till midnight. Actually, no, he was about three hours. It was like from ten until midnight or something. Then he moved it to Sunday night, which was a really good spot. Back in the ‘70s, it would be Klaus Schulze, Popul Vuh, classical Indian music, Paul Horn Inside the Pyramid, Terry Riley and everything in between. When [Brian] Eno started doing Ambient 1 and 2 and all of those things, that was staple.

Todd L. Burns

There was nothing else like this on the radio.

Robert Rich

There really wasn’t, not in California, that’s for sure. And there were only a couple of shows... There was Forest’s show Musical Starstreams that was playing more rock-oriented electronic music which is more on that Tangerine Dream school of sequencers and things. What Steven was calling space music, which really, I think refers better to inner space rather than cosmic outer space, it also would crossover into what was an honest new age culture at the time which I didn’t have anything to do with being a 17-year-old punk industrial influenced experimentally minded weirdo; I thought that this new-age scene was at least honest. It had a kind of post-hippie veracity to it. But I couldn’t stand the frilly rainbows and unicorns, and crystal stuff. Yet, some of the music that was coming out of that like Iasos, for example, although it was calling itself interdimensional music from some culture or another, it was often really pretty good in its own way. This was before new-age became really more of a new word for easy listening when we started getting the John Tesh’s and things like that, which is when we all started really trying to distance ourselves as far as we could from those labels. There wasn’t a bin in the record store at the time for this; you’d go to the rock section to find Tangerine Dream, but you’d go to the classical section to find Terry Riley. It didn’t really make much sense, and it never has to this day. I think that it’s always been a music in the fringes. It tends to be, like most introverted art forms, tends not to be a dominant paradigm. I think that what you’re saying, to get back to your question about hermits; a lovely quote of Daevid Allen from Gong has a poem where he quotes, “We are a community of hermits.” [laughs] We got to know Steven Hill because he was the only person playing our music. We didn’t know each other. These are people like Michael Sterns, Steve Roach, Jeff Greinke became a good friend of mine. He was a bit more on the art side of things. Some of the folks in Germany, Parsons, I forgot his first name, he’s in New Zealand, actually. Anyway, the point being that we didn’t know each other but the fact that there was this one DJ willing to play this kind of music, he put us in touch with each other. I was doing a sound installation in Los Angeles in 1985 for a Somerset Maugham play. He said, “Oh, while you’re down there, you should meet this guy, Steve Roach.” I’d never heard of Steven Roach except maybe a few pieces of his on Steven’s show. So Steve Roach and I got together for lunch and we found we had all sorts of things in common. We both had pet iguanas and we were Hawkwind fans. That was good enough for us. [laughs]

Todd L. Burns

I need to explore that iguana connection a little bit further. At a certain point with the radio show, he started a record label and you were one of the, I guess, first five or six releases on it.

Robert Rich

Yeah. 1989, he put out my album Rainforest. He had been playing my other albums which had been coming out in Europe at the time, in Sweden and France. He didn’t feel any of them were commercial enough for him. He was trying to make money, [laughs] which I can understand. I would send him the stuff as I was working on it. This album in ’88, I had finished called Rainforest. He said, “I would love to release this if you’re interested.” And it turned out to be one of his bestselling albums at that time, and certainly, my bestselling album of all times, before or since.

Todd L. Burns

Why do you think that one resonated in particular or was it just the marketing?

Robert Rich

Well, boy, it was a perfect storm. I think, because I was in a state of extreme depression about the state of the planet. I sometimes go into these big funks about fact that we’re destroying ourselves very quickly. I mean, the planet will be fine once it gets rid of us but it’s our own species that are doing a pretty good job of it right now. It was that concern about deforestation and truly, I was donating some of the sales to the rainforest action network, just trying to fix some things in Brazil and in Borneo. Maybe that hit a little bit of a wave of interest but I think there was also that tiny, little moment where independent labels could still get shelve space without having to pay for it. When there was a cross-marketing that could work without having to put names on music where the new age audience could find it and the space music audience could find it. The old people listening to German krautrock could find it. The whole thing, it crossed over the different markets accidentally. They did a good job of taking advantage of it.

Todd L. Burns

Just a couple of minutes ago, you talked about how you were a punk and weirdo. I think a lot of people don’t really recognize that some of your influences include people like Throbbing Gristle and Hafler Trio and these things, can you talk a little bit about how that connects to your work and how you mind people to hear it maybe in the attitude?

Robert Rich

I never was much of a punk. I didn’t really like the aggressive stance of the macho stance of guitar chords and that sort of thing. But I was playing in noisy improv groups, and some of the folks in those groups went on to do other interesting things. I was usually the guy playing the modular synthesizer making weird noises that made it all very strange. They did name me “The Professor.” I was 15 or 16 at that time doing that around 1979-1980, 17 I guess in 1980. Yeah, the influence of Throbbing Gristle was twofold, I think. One was the idea that you didn’t have to wait for anybody to tell you that you’re any good. You don’t need record labels. You can start your own, just do it, and that was their thing. The whole industrial movement also like Cabaret Voltaire and Wire and all of those guys that were big influences on me. Part of it was the attitude of DIY and nobody has to tell you that you’re good or that you know how to play music. If you have something to say, say it. The other thing I liked about Throbbing Gristle was that they talked about how music was energy, how music was a form of magic, and how with intention, you could direct the energy of music towards a purpose. And music is energy; it is a substance, it actually is a force, that changes things. And that is a shamanic idea; the idea that the intangible can change things. This is the essence of human creativity, isn’t it? When you think an idea for the first time, you’ve done something that the universe has never done before. You’ve actually created a new combination of words, a new combination of shapes. And that is miraculous. When you make something, when you make a sculpture, you have added something physical into the world, into the universe that didn’t exist. That is an act of creation. That’s an act of birth. That idea that Throbbing Gristle was dealing with about music as energy, music as ritual, was very, very powerful. I think during the ‘80s, the industrial movement became co-opted as a kind of dance music with Skinny Puppy where SPK started going and things like that. The more what people think of now is the sort of Nine Inch Nails sound. Back in the late ‘70s, it was pure experimental scary weirdness. That interested me. So I think my personality wasn’t so inclined towards the underbelly, the ugly underbelly of industrial, which was the celebration of only the shadows of human existence. Or if not the celebration, at least the focusing of spotlight upon them. I think my nature is generally one of much more introverted, little bit more shy, and a bit more positive. And so, to take those ideas of music as a form of magic, and to take that idea of shamanic ritual and to use it for community-building, and maybe that’s the old hippie in me coming out. It’s a weird hybrid.

Todd L. Burns

Community and community-building seems to be a major topic for you. Why is that? Is it like the Bay Area that’s coming through there, somehow?

Robert Rich

Well not just the Bay Area, because we have communities all over the world, don’t we? There’s a community of art music and a community of experimental thinking which is a web that covers the world with nodes sprinkled everywhere. And we become a worldwide, a global community. But also a real physical community and the people next to you, the people in this building right now. I’ve realized over the years that as our culture is increasingly virtualized, and that more and more people are experiencing their whole life in front of a little four- inch screen, that we’re losing something very fundamental about human existence. That as that shifts, which I’m seeing accelerated where I live in Silicon Valley, I mean, Google is located walking distance from my house...

Todd L. Burns

You’re literally seeing it firsthand.

Robert Rich

We are literally seeing it. And I’m literally seeing people becoming hermits surrounded by people. I mean, it’s the idea of being isolated in a world that... I ran out of words. I get frustrated, because really people are shutting themselves off from real experience to have a very delineated and filtered experience. A much smaller experience in this two-dimensional space. Whereas, this is real. We can buy somebody a coffee, buy somebody a tea, go for a walk. The physicality of human existence is something that as we deny further and further, we allow ourselves to further destroy our planet and our environment because we become we less aware of the destruction we’re doing. And I think that as we build an awareness, for example, of the food we eat, if we eat more local food, if we eat healthier-raised food, we help the actual planet that we’re living on, and the people who are growing that food. And we create joy with the people we cook with, with the people we dine with. And that joy is part of this artistic experience that we are interested in as artist or as musicians. And so, continuity for me between making art that’s lasting and powerful and transformative, and trying to live a life that is continuous with that, contiguous and complementary, so that the actions of growing my own food in my backyard instead of having some stupid lawn, which we do, we put in raised beds and drip irrigation and we raise lettuce and carrots, and broccoli and tomatoes, and we end up giving a lot of food to our neighbors [laughs] because we have too much. [laughs] That to me is not different from giving a concert for 30 or 40 sleeping people or making an album or mastering somebody else’s album. I do mastering, and I teach a college class in mastering. That aspect of teaching and giving back now has been also part of that continuity and part of that community. I really, really want to point out the importance of non-virtual; being in this place now, not taking a picture of it. Everybody goes out to dine and they want to take a picture of their food. Just talk to the person you’re with. [laughs] Remember the food. Remember the flavor of it. When I was driving in from the airport into Tokyo. This is the first I’ve been to Tokyo. My driver who is working for Red Bull said, “I’m surprised you’re not taking pictures. Everybody else I drive over this bridge is taking pictures.” I said, “No, it’s beautiful right now.” It’s moving me. The lights are scintillating in my heart. It’s gorgeous. If I’m taking a picture. I’m just seeing it through this little stupid lens and then I’ll have a file on my computer that I’m never going to look at. At least now, I’m experiencing something for real and it’s changing me. That’s kind of what I mean.

Todd L. Burns

How do you square all of these electronic music that you’re making. All these technology that you’re using with these ideas of trying to push back against it?

Robert Rich

Well, there’s a certain amount of irony because music is non-tangible, isn’t it? It is virtual experience to a certain extent. As far as electronics, they’re just instruments. I play flutes and I play percussion and piano and guitars. It’s just another instrument. The electronicness of it is only a way to transform sound, because I want the sound to be energetic and I want it to be surreal. I want it to be something that triggers a memory. The way to do that is just transform sounds into things that resemble something from a dream or resemble something you’ve never heard before or music from an alien species. And the way to do that is to warp, and bend, and twist, and manipulate.

Todd L. Burns

I want to talk about some of the collaborations you’ve done over the years. You’ve collaborated with a lot of people. One, I guess maybe unlikely one is Lustmord. You did something in 1995, I think it was?

Robert Rich

Yeah, Stalker.

Todd L. Burns

He comes from this UK Throbbing Gristle-type background.

Robert Rich

Just like his old friends of Chris and Cosey.

Todd L. Burns

How did you guys meet up, and how did that collaboration happen, because it seems like an unlikely partnership?

Robert Rich

Yeah. It’s very silly. I did an interview with a magazine around 1993. They asked me one question which is what sorts of music do you enjoy that isn’t like the kind you make? I said, “Well, lately, I’ve been enjoying stuff that Hafler Trio’s done and Zoviet France.” They had just come out with an album called Shouting At The Ground, which I thought was pretty brilliant. I mentioned Lustmord’s Heresy was pretty good. I really enjoyed that one and a couple of other things I mentioned that was in that territory of noise music or more dark ambient, I guess, is the term now. About six months or eight months later, it comes out in the magazine and I get a phone call with a funny Welshman’s accent and he says, “Hi, you probably don’t know me but this is Brian Williams, and I go with the name Lustmord. I saw you mention me in this article. I got your phone number. I’m quite flattered. I like your music too.” It’s like, “Really?” [laughs] I’d never expected that he would’ve been listening to new age music. We found a huge common ground because we’re both audiophiles. We both love big, deep, engulfing sound and we had fondness for a lot of similar approaches to sound. It’s not as odd of match as you would think. He’s also just a very nice person to be around. I mean, he’s not brooding and dark, and gothy like you’d think from the music.

Todd L. Burns

You said you’re both big audiophiles and you also mentioned mastery and engineering. How did you get into that aspect of things?

Robert Rich

Well, as being a control freak, if anybody here who’s... I try to be nice about it but I got... I’m super-organized. A little bit nerdy about my sound and my set-up and when I tour I am my own sound engineer. I’ve just always been a perfectionist that way, it’s my personality. And so, when I started releasing albums on Hearts of Space [Records], it was the first time I ever had access to the idea that this stuff was going to have a decent mastering engineer. And I wanted to be there because I wanted to learn everything that was going on, but I also wanted to make sure he didn’t screw up, because I want control! [laughs] So the person who is doing all the mastering for Hearts of Space was a fellow named Bob Ohlsson. Bob had worked at Motown for the ten years they were in Detroit. He had engineered the first Stevie Wonder albums and Marvin Gaye and all sorts of famous Motown albums. When Motown left Detroit and moved to Los Angeles, he came out to San Francisco and became very good friends with Steven Hill back in the ‘70s and was the mastering engineer for all of the Hearts of Space albums. Bob and I got along like wildfire. I mean, I basically was always sitting in with mastering sessions asking questions, telling him what I wanted, [laughs] and he became my mentor, as it were. I was very lucky to have somebody who really had the old school history of recording in his soul.

Todd L. Burns

What were the particular things that you were very focused on making sure it sounded right?

Robert Rich

I wanted to make sure that things weren’t too loud or too bright. That the fades were really slow. I mean, I was just meticulous. There was a certain sound I wanted that you could describe as being more brown. I didn’t want it to be yellow. I wanted it to be sepia and warm, and slightly... Not veiled, because I wanted the scintillating top end, but I was composing with tonalities that were filling out frequency spaces that I wanted to be very specific. He completely respected that. When he left for Nashville in the late ‘90s, I ended up taking over his mastering work for Hearts of Space. By that time, by around 1995, people were coming to me to ask me to work on their albums. Jeff Greinke had me remastered his old releases. A Produce who’s now passed away, Barry Craig, I’ve mastered most of his albums. Then started going into a lot of the ethereal, goth project stuff, [such as the group] Love Spirals Downwards, so it wasn’t just ambient at this point now. It’s been a lot of styles and music.

Todd L. Burns

What are the things that you see like young musicians doing quote-unquote wrong, that you’re helping out in the mastering process? Is there anything that you continually see that they can learn?

Robert Rich

Well, as a mastering engineer, the thing that I’m always going on and on about is not to fight the loudness wars. There’s no winning that war. It’s like a nuclear arms race. Step off the rail on that one. Just get off the stairs because loudness doesn’t make it better. Loudness comes from the big thing that says volume on your amplifier. Resolution goes downwards into silence. It’s quiet. The stuff sounds better because of dynamic range and the listeners who decide how loud it gets. The loudness thing is one thing, especially with electronic dance music. Things are so smashed. Man, have you heard some of the Skrillex albums? They’re unlistenable. There was less dynamic range than full on white noise. Yeah, that’s the first thing. But also to leave space for the different frequencies. To allow your production to stretch into experiential realms so you say, “I’m going to choose this instrument because it does something in this frequency range.” That’s part of orchestration. That’s what old-school orchestration is. You get the horns to do something here because you want that frequency range to fill in a certain experience. I love deep low-end, but you don’t want it to be there all the time. You want to show people you have it and then take it away, and then show them you have it again, so that the speakers aren’t always working, but when they give it to you, they’ll really give it to you. That way, there’s dynamic range and that low-end can really speak. All that kind of stuff. But even more important, I think, from a production and creation side of it, is to break out of structures. A lot of the software and the tools suggest ways of working like keeping your tempo the same all the time. Keeping everything in bar lines, blocking out your stuff into verse and chorus, and bridge, and different kinds of block structures. That’s artificial. Musicians don’t think that way. If somebody’s going to take a solo for an extra bridge and a half, you can bend with it. You can make the music so much more fluid and poetic by not letting the software dictate your decisions. So much electronic music, and even now, acoustic and electric pop music is built in block structures. It’s like Lego. It’s so predictable, and it’s really, really boring. Go back and listen to some supposedly very predictable songs from a pop group like Crowded House. You’ll find that they’ll have a verse that’s only three lines long and then they’ll suddenly jump into a totally different part of the song. It’s surprising, and it’s fun, and it’s much more organic. That comes from writing with people and being human about your ideas and not letting the software impose structure. That’s a few suggestions.

Todd L. Burns

One of the things you talked about in the past also I find quite interesting is that you actually don’t know a ton of instruments; that limitation is really helpful for you. You’re obviously someone who’s really into gear in a way.

Robert Rich

Less than you’d think, but yeah, to a certain extent.

Todd L. Burns

But not, in a way. You’re not into gear because its infinite possibility is actually quite terrible.

Robert Rich

Limitation is the best thing you could possibly have in your creative life. Endless choices is self-destruction. Just remember that and you’ll be fine. [laughter] Really, really, really put things away. Don’t look at them. Pick one or two things and make an album with it. It’s so much easier. But yeah, I feel like I’m faking it almost all the time. Every time, I try to...

Todd L. Burns

Really?

Robert Rich

Really.

Todd L. Burns

Why?

Robert Rich

Because I’m not a musician, I can barely... I can’t read music, I can’t write music, I can’t play anybody else’s music. If somebody wants me to sit in for a 12-bar blues jam, I’ll play drums because I don’t know what to do. I think it’s supposed to go down here now but it’s really from the very beginning, I started out as with the intention of being a sound artist. I thought that it was just going to be like installations and sculpture and performance art or something. Suddenly, I had to figure out what a chord was and what a minor key, or a mode, or what’s a diminished? It’s all self-taught. You could put me around some real musicians and I really shut up. [laughs] I’m not kidding. I’m faking it.

Todd L. Burns

In the past though, you have been making samples, I guess, for libraries and other things to do with technology.

Robert Rich

Yeah. I mean, that’s, it’s a good income. I mean, part of it is that one of my rules for my own music, and this is related to that previous question, was instead of using sample libraries, I make all of my own sounds. I only have a few sounds, but I made them all. It gives my music a specific sound. It sounds like me. I don’t need to sound like everybody else. I don’t care if I have the best cello sample in the world. If I want a cello, I’ll hire a cellist. I want the sound to be something that I did because it’s real. And so, after years of doing that, people I knew... I happen to know a lot of folks that were in synthesizer companies back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s at Sequential Circuits and E-mu.They knew I could do this and they started coming to me asking for samples. So back in the early ‘80s, I did a bunch of sound design for the Prophet-5 presets, and then the E-mu Proteus modules... They knew I had a bunch of weird ethnic instruments, udu drums and things with rubber bands and things, and they asked me if I could do a sample library for what became the Proteus 3 World module back in... Wow, long time ago now, 1993?

Todd L. Burns

This was through Rick?

Robert Rich

Rick Davies was a very good friend at Sequential Circuits. I didn’t know you knew that. You did your research. [laughs]

Todd L. Burns

And we had Dave Smith here actually earlier this week.

Robert Rich

Yeah. I was playing in a band with Rick Davies and Andrew McGowan. Andrew played bass on Rainforest and he played bass in my group Amoeba. Back in 1982, we were in a group together called Urdu. If you’d see me on stage singing and looping in Urdu, you would worry for my sanity, really. I think people thought I was psychotic. It might be just a little bit. I don’t know. [laughs] Yeah, Andrew and his wife Joan, basically became the entire front office for Dave Smith’s instruments. I knew Dave back when I was 16-year-old hanging around with his employees at Sequential Circuits. I got a Prophet 5 that had been a reject that I could keep working barely and that was my synthesizer.

Todd L. Burns

These were the early Prophet-5s.

Robert Rich

Rev 1, yeah. This might be really boring tech talk for you guys but the Sequential Circuits, their very first product was a sequencer voltage memory, but then I became friends with a bunch of local guys that were working there. The company was really loose. It was like 40 people and they were mostly musicians that barely knew electronics. The Prophet-5, which was the first polyphonic digital synthesizer, it was analog but a digital control synthesizer with memory in other words. The Rev 1 was a lemon. It was basically a prototype that they made 400 of. It was point to point soldering to fix problems on the circuit board. There was glue on places to keep things from falling... It was just a wreck. As soon as they could get one that wouldn’t break when you looked at it, the Rev 2... The Rev 1 by the way, they were selling for $6,000 in 1978, really a lot of money. Then for a mere $1500, they got all of those professional musicians who already paid $5,000 or something to get one that work. Then they took all of the old lemons back in and they sold them to their employees for $500. And that’s how I got my first decent synthesizer.

Todd L. Burns

I mean, those synths were smoking. They were catching on fire.

Robert Rich

The Rev 1 had problems they called the green caps. If you’ve ever done any circuitry, there’s something called a shunt capacitor. It goes on the ground line between the positive and the ground to filter out the DC noise on the line. Most capacitors when they fail, they fail open. Well, the green caps unfortunately had a high failure rate and they all failed shorted instead of opened, which meant smoke. Really, really bad. Power supplies would actually blow up because you were just basically putting a screw driver across the rails. [laughs] It’s just really a disaster. And it wasn’t their fault! They just had a bad bunch of caps.

Todd L. Burns

So you got the version two?

Robert Rich

No, I had the Rev 1.

Todd L. Burns

Oh, you had the version one.

Robert Rich

My first one was Joe Zawinul’s and it barely worked. It was so bad and so the next one I had was... oh, shit. What’s his name? Michael Boddicker’s that he traded in. My first recordings were made, not my very first recordings, but the Michael Boddicker Prophet-5 Rev 1 was the one I used until I sold it.

Todd L. Burns

What are you using nowadays to make music?

Robert Rich

That’s really boring, isn’t it? I mean, it’s just stuff. Stuff changes. I use... I’ll make samples out of things I record and I’ll mangle them and slow them down and stretch them out, and do stuff, and make it sound different. I kind of have a reputation for being a modular synth guy. That’s because a guy who started a modular synth company in the 1990s was a fan of my music. He said, “Would you like to write a review of my MOTM modular?” I said, “Sure.” By the way, this is another life lesson for anybody who’s going to be a professional musician. Keep doing everything that makes money. Say yes to everything. If anybody comes to you with an offer to make money, it’s going to be rare. One of the things I was doing to make money was writing articles for these music magazines like Electronic Musician and Home Studio Recording and all of those things back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And I was writing reviews for electronic musician and he asked the editor if they could have me write the review of his modular. It was a ploy on his part because he was a fan of mine and he wanted to meet me, which is no big deal, I’m not elusive. He also wanted me to start beta-testing his new modules. He basically let me keep the stuff I had after I did the review. Then lo and behold, with a little dirty look from the editors of the magazine, two years later, you’d see me at NAMM demoing the darn stuff. So Paul Schreiber was the guy who built MOTM Modular Synthesis technology. Well, my wife says I’m his trained monkey. At NAMM shows, I try to make his modulars sound good so that people will buy them. I’ve worked my way into a rather large modular system by helping to design some of the modules with concepts and with... For something called the cloud... I’m sorry. What is it? The Morphing Terrarium is one of the modules where I designed all of the wave cycles. It’s a digital wave form oscillator that’s analog-controlled. It has 192 single-cycle wave forms and then I spend a month or two creating all of the wave forms. You end up with a lot of analog modular stuff. It looks nice. It blinks and makes weird sounds. And so I get a reputation for that. This is how it grows.

Todd L. Burns

What do you like about modular synthesizers so much?

Robert Rich

I like it that there’s no lines. That there’s no rules. You plug anything at anything else. It can go squish. It’s like clay, really. I mean, once you get familiar with... And it’s also my first instrument when I was 13, I started building modular kits because I wasn’t a rich kid, I made the money for paper routes and gardening, and babysitting, and things.

Todd L. Burns

There’s this company called Paya, right?

Robert Rich

Yeah. That’s the stuff. It was horrible. For $35, you could an oscillator kit. For $27, you could get a VCA or an envelope. And the stuff barely worked, you could really not make music with it. In 1976/’77/’78, I would build it like one kit a month with paper route money. After a year or two, I had a wall stuff that sounded bad. But it made noise. In fact, you probably... We can do it. Let’s not talk for a few moments. If you could play Premonitions. Let’s see. I think it’d be the side two of the first record is a piece called “Low Sounds.” It’s a collage for low noises or collage for low noise. Jump about five minutes into this or something. That’s fine.

(music: Robert Rich – “Low Sounds”)

[comments] This is before I had the Prophet-5. I was 17 when I did this. This is around 1980. It’s an improvisation live to cassette with home-built electronics. The Paya was almost incapable of staying in tune. You immediately give up on the idea of sounding like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream because I didn’t have $100,000 to buy the giant wall of Moog like they had. You can hear more the Throbbing Gristle influence too, I guess. I guess I mentioned this because this is all modular home-built stuff. In some ways, this was my first instrument aside from piano or voice or something. It’s just a native language for me.

Todd L. Burns

I could on for a long time with you but I want to open up the questions.

Robert Rich

Absolutely. Otherwise, it’ll become a sleep talk, like a sleep concert.

Todd L. Burns

Does anyone have anything that they would like to ask? Is there a microphone around?

Audience Member

Hello, hello.

Todd L. Burns

Is that...

Robert Rich

One of ours?

Audience Member

Hello, hello.

Robert Rich

Hi.

Audience Member

I was interested about the conception of magic in the music. For some years, I’ve been researching a little bit on rituals and stuff. I wanted to ask you if there’s anything you can share with us, like an accidental magic that could be good to open the conscience in music, and if there’s anything that you do or you know that you could share?

Robert Rich

Let me see if I can try to... This is a difficult thing to talk about. I would say that there’s no rituals that I perform. There’s nothing I do in particular. I don’t practice any tradition at all, except perhaps meditation of a sort of Sufi sort. As far as magic is concerned, what I mean is there is a certain type of concentration that creates realities. And this is something that artist learn. It works in life and it’s a very strange thing. What you do is concretize something. You make it real in your mind. It’s not the same as imagining. It’s not the same as creating something in front of you. What it is is allowing homunculus to form. Allowing a golem or a landscape to come and become alive. It starts taking you over. You allow it in and you say, “OK, it will grow. I will let it there and I will observe it grow. I will let it become conscious.” It could be described similarly is psycho-physiological terms, in that we are creating a subroutine in our brain which becomes this creative force. It’s internal. It doesn’t have to be all woo-y and magical. It’s a metaphor that we can use that has power because our minds work with metaphors. We tell this story. The story of the golem, the medieval rabbi who makes a little boy out of clay and breathes the word of God into this little pile of clay. It gets up and runs off, and creates all sorts of mischief. He shouldn’t have breathed the secret word into it. This is what art is. Just like the story of the golem, like the mistake that that rabbi made, he did not have humility. To practice this kind of magic we need to take full humility and we need to take full ownership for our actions. That’s why in my own life, I’ve decided to take a path of more of a gentle music, and of a non-violent and a more communal-minded, because I own my actions, because these Golems that I released, these homunculi, they can go off and do all sorts of damage. I need to impart within them the best energy that I can but when I create an album, it waits to be created. What happens is I’m not making it from my ego. I’m waiting until the album forms a thing. And that thing is real before I even start making sound. Then what I do is I’m working to create notes that resemble the world that is making itself happen in my head. I try to approximate the thing so that it can come out into that music. I’m reciting in other words. I’m taking dictation. But it’s not like Mozart. I mean, Mozart says that he was writing as fast as he could. He probably was, because he was insanely inspired for somebody to write that much music in a short life. It’s harder for me. My form of dictation is experimenting until it sounds something like what the world is telling me, what the homunculus, what the golem is saying to me. It’s not like, “No, this album doesn’t sound like that. This album sounds like this. You need it to be... Wetter. You need it to be dryer. You need it to be higher, lower.” I go, “Oh, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do this.” I say I’m a faker, because most of the time, I don’t know how to write the notes down. I’m just trying to take the dictation. But the first key is to follow the “Why,” and this is another aspect of magic, is to know purpose first. If you have purpose, then you have direction. Then you know the questions to asks and the questions are far more important than the answers. The answers just come out.

Audience Member

Perfect. Thank you.

Audience Member

Hello. Thanks for your lecture. You talked about TGs earlier in your lecture. I recently saw Psychic TV live in Paris, and Genesis P-Orridge was talking about trance state in Africa on a recent trip. What’s your point of view about trances? Is it the state that you want the listener to reach while listening to your music? Is it to state that you try to reach while making your music? What’s your point of view about trance in music?

Robert Rich

I think that music and trance are completely tied in very closely together and music is the language that grew up, I think, out of ritual and shamanism and trance. If you look at the way it’s used in many culture still to this day, you could call it hypnosis if you want to be western or scientific about it. The roles of drone and repetition are immensely important in these questions. Just like there are in drugs and exogenous influences of psychic phenomenon, there are endogenous influences of psychic phenomenon that we build ourselves. We could say that they’re chemical, but there are also many other levels. Just like drugs can be soporific or enhancing, they can be uppers or downers, let’s say, so can trances. There are less-productive forms, in my mind – I’m being judgmental here so excuse the judgmental terminology... My own feelings in my life have come to the point where I feel that the trances that involve over stimulation are less useful than the ones that involve rarefied stimulation which is why my music is so quiet. I think that the things going at psytrance raves are very interesting and they’re very powerful. But they’re not as nutritious. What I find is that if you look at the touchstone of the result, if you measure the person’s life and the person’s utility in life, you’ll find the whispering forms of trance, that the focal energizing ones create more enhanced life directions in people. They get more done and they’re more useful. I’ve seen a lot of burnout cases at psy raves. You see a bunch of people who can barely form a sentence. Maybe it’s just years of DMT use, but it’s also, there’s a quality of over-stimulation where they become incapable of changing the world now. They’ve changed themselves so much that they’re now just a basket case. In spiritual disciplines, though, they’ll refer to a center of gravity. You’ll see this in Zen. You’ll see it in Sufism. The silent forms of meditation or of trance tend to lower your center of gravity. They make it hard to push you over and I mean psychically as well. The high drama, high-dynamic-range kinds of trance tend to bring your center of gravity up. They make it very easy to tip you over. You’ll find that people will land to things like schizophrenia and stuff like that, where the balance point is set off-kilter. So I think out of basically becoming an old fart, my own strange, radical conservatism is that I think that when we change ourselves, we need to do it with that center of gravity. [laughs] There’s a couple of questions still? Yeah. Mic is moving its way around.

Audience Member

Hello.

Robert Rich

Hi.

Audience Member

Hi. Thanks to be there. My question is have you been ever influenced by different artist coming from concrete music like Pierre Henry, for example, Fluxus movement in contemporary arts, or this artist who actually work a lot with sounds?

Robert Rich

Not so much directly, although certainly the history of Pierre Henry and people like that are extremely essential for the history of recorded music. I would say that hasn’t directly influenced me. Some of the Fluxus artist have influenced me more though. My joke about Yoko Ono is, The Beatles destroyed Yoko. [laughter] She was doing brilliant work before she met John. Actually, Marcel Duchamp, I think, it would be the spiritual progenitor of the Fluxus. I think his work is very influential for me. But oddly, there was one Fluxus performer who influenced the sleep concerts. I haven’t read my own interviews in a while, I’m forgetting his name. Sometimes, when you’re talking it’s hard to think. He would put whistles in his mouth and he would sit on a hammock and fall asleep in front of an audience. His sleeping would cause the whistles to blow back and forth. [laughs] I thought, “That’s a lazy way to do it. We should at least get some work.” But yeah, I think that situational art and dada, and surrealism, and installation art, all of those things are very, very important for me.

Todd L. Burns

One thing we didn’t touch on, I guess, was the sculpture, of visual art and these other things play as big of a role, it seems like.

Robert Rich

For me, big time. Yeah. It’s huge. I started out thinking I was more of a visual artist than a sound artist. I used to draw and paint a lot when I was little. But I was never satisfied because it was too physical, and I wanted to paint my dreams and to paint my hallucinations because I would have these vivid living hallucinations. I hated my paintings because they were still, they weren’t the energy that was in my brain. But what I found was that music could give me those vibrant hallucinations directly. I felt that it would make more sense to try to give them to people inside of themselves rather than to just try to represent what I did. That was more of the activating principle. Yeah, it definitely came from a visual art thing but in some ways a living painting, an imaginary painting. Yeah. There’s microphone back there. Move it over his way. You’re still stranded over here.

Audience Member

Thank you Mr. Rich for being here. I got a couple of questions, actually. First one is you grew up in San Francisco next to this Grateful Dead band. Now, you’re this audiophile, you love working with speakers. Big speakers, being surrounded by music. I always got this fixation with this character around the Grateful Dead crew that, everybody calls him the “Bear.”

Robert Rich

Owsley?

Audience Member

Yeah, Owsley.

Robert Rich

They just liked it because he was making the acid. [laughs]

[laughter]

Audience Member

No, no, I know. I know but what I read is that he actually constructed the speakers.

Robert Rich

He built some of the first ones but they weren’t as good as history pretends. And Dan Healy was the sound guy that made them sound good. Owsley built some of the very first speakers and Dan Healy built some of the amplifiers and also some of the cabinets. There were several different teams of people within the rock & roll history that invented the PA system. I mean, really like the rock & roll soundsystem. The guys who were touring with the early version of Fleetwood Mac actually, the Peter Green version of Fleetwood Mac also were some of the very first PA systems ever. Dan Healy and Owsley PAs for the Dead, also, we mustn’t forget the name which I forgot. Sorry. John, they’re current but he’s... John Meyer. Since 1980, the Dead were using Meyer Sound, John Meyer has a major company now. He was doing all their soundsystems throughout the ‘90s. Yeah. There’s a big team of people with a group like that and with rock & roll PA systems, you’re dealing with a whole other level of power and focal point and feedback suppression. I don’t know a thing about that world.

Audience Member

My second question is about, in Peru, in these Ayahuasca sessions, they got this beautiful litanies called icaros. I was asking if you worked with that, know about that, and how that influenced you?

Robert Rich

I’ve never done one of those shamanic sessions personally. I know people who have who actually went to Peru to work with shaman in Ayahuasca ceremonies. I think for me, I think the drugs become a displacement. And also we can too easily attach ourselves to various cultural traditions which are different from our own. It’s important, I think, not to graft traditions inaccurately or inappropriately between cultures. Part of the reason for doing the kind of music I do, and I said I would get back to it early, early in this long talk, one of the purposes of the sleep concert and this idea of ritual was to try to find a way to create a grounding ritual that was communal and public, but yet was modern in the 20th or 21st century and could work conceptually with our technological and scientific world view, and that didn’t require a credulousness in a certain realm. I mean, in other words, I don’t have to believe that I’m riding the leopard with coyote. You know, I don’t have to touch the snake. The language of shamanic ritual is very specific to each culture. And our culture has a new language, and so we need a new ritual; one that’s appropriate to us. I don’t know what it is yet. I’m still looking.

Todd L. Burns

Sorry. You’ve worked with other cultures, their music in your own. I’m wondering if you maybe talk about some of the ones that you have and why you felt that they have been special to your language, your musical language.

Robert Rich

I’ll try to say it really quickly is that I think I just gravitate towards the sound of a certain way of using melody and drone. And it’s a sound, if you just look at an arc that goes from North Africa across Persia and Eastern Europe and down across North India into Indonesia, you’ve got an influence, which has been carried since the Muslim revolution in the 600s, but it came before then. There’s a language that’s very ancient. You can even hear it in Coptic Ethiopian and you can hear it in pre-Muslim Himalayan music. There was a way of using melody that relates to ecstasy. When Islamic music found that within their own culture, they carried it around other cultures, and so you find it elsewhere. It’s universal, and it’s very human. That’s what gets me. It’s when a melody starts doing things to my brain that change me. And it’s the energy, it’s a very pure, very direct communication. My friendships with Indian musicians and with some Eastern European musicians... If they can get that sound, that’s all I’m looking for. [laughs] It’s what I’m always try to find. It’s why I play the instruments I do and I’m playing flute or a lap steel guitar. I’m just searching for it and I don’t have the right training. I mean that’s fine. That’s my honey.

Audience Member

Hi. OK. You know about frequencies. I really like drone music. I really like microtones, I like dissonance, and just vibrations in music. I was just talking to Nick recently about this, actually. At one point, in more religious contexts, hundreds or thousands of years ago when religious music... Religious music, they found the frequencies that would maybe [be] more enchanting; that would affect people, like chakra systems, or things of that nature, in a positive way; or they could see the effects of these frequencies on people. I feel like I don’t know enough about this. But at some point, the churches, they realized the control they could have over people and found these certain frequency ranges that kinda became oppressive, actually, and have become the main scale of Western music now. I think about that a lot because in Western music, you’re very specific for 440s A; all these things, and it omits all these other frequencies that make you feel these other things. That’s why I’m drawn to Middle Eastern music a lot and things like that because it’s swinging on these scales. It’s very spiritual and it affects me physically in a different way. How do you think about that, or like what are you feelings about that, basically?

Robert Rich

The history of tuning is fascinating. I also tend to be a bit of a skeptic when people go into things like A440 versus A432 or whatever. It’s a continuum. It’s like you’re just tuning a different A. So what? It’s a sharp A flat at that point. There’s a certain scientific undercurrent in my thinking as well. When people go towards this way of thinking where a certain frequency changes a certain chakra or a certain chord is the sacred chord, I find this to be claustrophobic. Not right or wrong but just limiting. It’s a box that we don’t need. What I love is expressive, ecstatic relationships between frequencies. They’re all over the place. There’s relationships that are out there and the relationships are rather simple to understand. They relate to the harmonic series which is simple math. It’s the way that consonant intervals relate with overtones. Once we make that observation that we’ve got a whole-numbered ratios, we have an infinite number of whole-numbered ratios. Now, we can play around. It just expands our playground. We have a big sandbox we can make castles with. We can build them up and tear them down, and it’s a beautiful thing. I don’t feel that there’s one right tuning, one wrong tuning. I don’t think that there’s a right or wrong way to do anything. I just love expressive human creation. To me, microtonal, or just intonation in particular, gives me a wider palate of colors. I find that to be more expressive. I personally love the way a seven over four sounds. That’s my favorite interval.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Robert Rich

[points] Two there and two back there.

Audience Member

Thanks for being here.

Robert Rich

Thanks.

Audience Member

You mentioned inner space before, I wanted to ask you what’s your take of James Graham Ballard’s take on inner space that it’s something that includes our perversions and our negative aspects of our minds as opposed to what you’re referring to the things that connect the listeners or the creators with a listeners, and well that aspect.

Robert Rich

What’s the writer’s name again? Graham Ballard?

Audience Member

J.G. Ballard.

Robert Rich

J.G. Ballard.

Audience Member

Yeah. I’m sorry. Excuse me.

Robert Rich

No, I’m sorry.

Audience Member

No, no, I’m sorry. My accent is... Sorry. It’s a little worse.

Robert Rich

No, that’s OK. I’m a big fan of J.G. Ballard, but he’s also a very hurt soul. He had a really rough childhood.

Audience Member

About the juxtaposition between that Ballard defined inner space or something awful in a way as opposed to what you were saying.

Robert Rich

Yeah. That’s true. The funny thing is I love Ballad’s writing because he also has such an expansive way of creating that sense of loneliness of his heroes. They’re always so stranded and so lost. But you know, that’s because everybody has their own life experience. His story started with a very dark set of underpinnings. I mean, you know, he grew up in a prison camp during World War II. The distinction or the judging of good or bad and inner or outer, I think are problematic. And when we look at the human character, we see that it’s full of light and full of dark. And they’re all intertwined and almost inseparable. I think that’s really what Ballard was saying is that great humanity, great kindness can be infolded with great cruelty, just as birth and death are part of the same process. I think that, maybe as an indirect way to answer that, I’ll describe a piece that Annea Lockwood did that moved me very, very deeply. I think this might encompass this idea of birth and death. She referenced a Shona ritual in Ghanaian culture that, when a child is born, they would find a certain branch of an acacia tree that splits apart and then, because the tree grows funny it grows back together again. They would separate that branch out from the tree when the mother is pregnant. And when the baby is born, if the baby lives, they break that circle of branch apart and keep it with that child for the duration of his or her life. When that person dies, 20, 50, 80 years later, in the burial ritual, that stick, which is part of their collection of life possessions is buried with them and connected back over their body. What this deals with is this idea that was very common also within the surrealists, that... And I’m talking in particular about the writer...

Todd L. Burns

Breton?

Robert Rich

Not Breton. It was actually... [points to head] My Google is not working right now. [laughter] I’ll get it. I’ll get it back there but he wrote a lot on sex and death in particular. The French have a lovely word for orgasm which is “La petite mort.” This idea though that he was... George Bataille is the writer. Bataille dealt with the idea of life and death as that life was the discontinuity. That birth is discontinuous, and death is a return to continuity. This Shona ritual is identical to that where they’re showing that that circle is broken by birth and returned into death. And so, when we think about our lives in an egocentric way, we’re saying that this separation of us from the universe is defining us, but really, what it’s doing is, it’s defining our death. This is a very brief moment of assemblage of structure. It changes over a course of a lifetime, and then it dissolves again. Annea Lockwood did an amazing performance art piece with a friend of hers who was a sculptor and was dying of throat cancer, or actually, the whole body was taken over by cancer. She interviewed him just a day before he died. He could barely speak, his voice was all torn up. He was talking about coming to terms with death. She played this recording while intersplicing it with sounds of the forest and chopping wood, and walking, and just people in a natural environment. She did this at New Music America [festival] in 1980. She sat on the stage, cross-legged. She played this tape for about 25 minutes. She created one single motion that took 25 minutes to make. She started with two sticks on her lap and very slowly, 25 minutes later, the two sticks were connected at the top of her head. It was so powerful. I’m even crying right now. It’s very, very hard to tell the story because the audience afterwards, silent. The performance showed the answer to your question.

Audience Member

Thank you for that.

Audience Member

I have one. Hi. My question will be very mundane after this, I’m afraid.

Robert Rich

No problem. It’s OK.

Audience Member

I really enjoyed your story about coming from the airport and trying to enjoy the surroundings by just looking at them, and not filter them through a possible camera or phone, whatever. I was thinking, do you feel that there is an equivalent to that in music? Like the thing that live visuals or videos kind of might take away from a sheer enjoyment of music.

Robert Rich

Absolutely. In fact, it depends on the purpose of the music I would say. If the purpose is entertainment, if you’re trying to create excitement... I mean if you’re doing a pop concert, if you’re Beyoncé or something like that, you’re not going to do some rarefied thing, you’re going to put on a full on performance. That’s what people are paying you for. If you want to do something profound, though, you might try pulling away influences, pulling away stimuli. This is my own feeling. It’s my own theory about art. Not necessarily proven or true, but I feel that when fewer things impinge upon us, they can have a stronger influence and they’ll trigger more activity inside of our creative minds. Each person experiencing it will have potentially a more profound experience because they have to make more of the experience inside of themselves. Art is about creative muscle. It’s not about handing somebody a basketful of eggs. This is a strange metaphor, but play with me here. Essentially, in our culture, we assume that an artistic act puts information into a box and then it conveys that information to people. It’s like a basket of eggs. Little Red Riding Hood is coming to take cookies to her grandmother. So let’s imagine that’s completely irrelevant. Let’s come up with a metaphor that’s perpendicular to this. Not making it wrong or right but just saying maybe it’s something else. What if, in fact, art is exercising a muscle. There’s a truth muscle, a beauty muscle, an anger muscle, a fear muscle; and these are things in our brains that the more we exercise them, the stronger they get. If we sit here and watch world news tonight every night, we watch all the bombings and diseases and horrors that the governments are causing on each other, our fear muscle becomes very powerful, very strong. We become more angry. We act in ways that are like a mouse hiding from the world. We vote in ways that react according to fear. We treat other people according to those rules of fear. So as artists, if we could exercise different muscles, perhaps we can strengthen ways of behaving. It’s a little bit like if you’re an athlete and you hire a personal trainer, they say, “Before you do anything, I just want you to get out of your car. Don’t drive your car. Next time you go shopping, walk to the store.” You find yourself wasting all this time walking to the store and you’re getting something else done. You’re actually getting stronger while you’re getting your bread and carrots. One thing might differentiate from another action, it might sound like it’s doing something different but in fact, it might be causing action in several different layers. It’s how all the stories like in zen of the teacher getting people to... There’s a lovely Sufi phrase. If you have no troubles, buy a goat. That’s because goats are pain in the butt, right? [laughs] It’s good for you. My point is that if you look at how multimedia impinges upon our sense and creates overstimulation, and which can be a form of trance relating to that question back there, that kind of overstimulated trance can create a very numbing effect on the brain, and it creates a shutdown. What we do is we become very used to filling in all of the gaps with sensory information and not actually creating more ourselves. If we want to stimulate people instead of just turn them into zombies, what we can do is start thinning out the information so that we do little pinpricks and remove things and then start exciting their own muscles.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Robert Rich

Yeah.

Todd L. Burns

We have a question back there.

Audience Member

Hi. I have a couple of questions. One is like, I’m a big fan of industrial music and Throbbing Gristle and the whole idea of Genesis P-Orridge, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth and everything. It’s not that clear that even if you read all the text and everything. Do you think that these guys, the industrial musicians, they work with the term of magic? Because I think that those guys were the ones that after the Second World War, meaning a globalized world, embraced this idea of death. They were working with, I don’t know, what magic for them is like... As you said, with this performance you were describing. I want to know why they got to that point when ritual and techno shamanism, as they were calling it, it’s now about giving significance to things because in this world we’re so globalized and virtuality is, I don’t know, this lack of spirituality, it needs to be filled with something that in the end is technology, is industrial. The name is like... Makes their direct reference not to nature but to, I don’t know, factories or postwar stuff. Do you think that it’s fair to say that magic nowadays has more to do with these technological and hyperreal environment more than how it used to be like in many years ago or with the old cultures?

Robert Rich

I think it’s choices we make. I think one of the main points, although it’s true that industrial culture, industrial art, Psychic TV, I guess all those folks in general, and specifically, I think Genesis P-Orridge’s fascination with the satanic cult ritual stuff, for lack of a better word, which I find childish, just silly to be honest. I don’t find it evil or anything, I just kind of... Goofy. I think that what it refers to is the personal choice directs your direction. It’s an act of free will. Genesis’s particular decision to focus on the macabre or the death side of things, the Thanatos, the death urge, is a personal direction that is natural to his inclination. You find that when Throbbing Gristle broke up and when Chris and Cosey went their own way, they had a very different energy, a much more positive energy. Coming from that same idea of music as energy, music as a potential transformative medium, but yet, not obsessing over the thanatotic but rather choosing to direct energies into places where they can actually be functional. Again, I encourage you to use what in spirituality, they called the touch stone. What results in the personality of the people who are practicing something? Are they becoming better? Or are they becoming worn-out or decaying in some way? I’m not making any sort of religious judgment call upon what’s good or evil. I don’t have any of that. It’s not about good and evil. It’s about focusing energy towards things that are life-affirming. And we know that life and death are all interfolded, but we can write songs about how the Nazis killed millions of people with gas chambers like “Zyklon B Zombie,” for example. We can write songs about how a friend of Genesis’s was an orderly in the hospital and described the patient who was completely burnt, “Hamburger Lady.” Or we can create ritual that in fact moves people in a direction that gets them to do something to change. Now, the funny thing is that that very negative dark magic that he would be more attached to also would work to energize me as a teenager who needed that at that moment. But then I’m not going to sit there and wallow in it. I’m going to use it as a kick in the ass. It gets me to start doing something to change the world. Rather than sitting there and just morosely cocooning into a thanatotic paranoia. I think that choosing to activate in certain directions, not about right or wrong or good or bad, but in terms of what energizes us to change or do something. Then what keeps us healthy and what keeps us sustaining. I would say that Genesis is probably not the best example of how to live a healthy life. [laughs]

Audience Member

Another question, coming back to the sound part of your work and this aesthetic: Do you think that modular synthesis, even if it’s on hardware or in Ableton Live or something like that, you were saying like when you were a child, you were working as if it was like play. I once saw this really monumental performance by Robert Henke, the “Studies for Thunder.” It’s more than a concert. It was like a sonic sculpture.

Robert Rich

His work is great. He’s a good friend of mine, too, and he’s brilliant.

Audience Member

Do you think that in that way modular synthesis, since it’s not like directly related to a keyboard or notes and all that, because some musicians don’t like for them to be encapsulated in this... I don’t know what they call like sonic sculptures. I think that, for example, you’re making an experience and its purpose is to be like reflective with the audience to see themselves through the mirror. You’re putting in front...

Robert Rich

Forgive me for cutting you off, I wanted to focus your question. Are you referring to the purpose of the synthesis or the tools themselves?

Audience Member

No, the purpose and the meaning.

Robert Rich

What I would say about that is that the tools are just tools. It’s like discussing which is the better hammer or shovel. We can discuss this shovel has a point and this shovel has a blunt end. You should this one to shovel snow but this one to dig a hole. That’s not a very interesting conversation. What’s more interesting is why do you want to dig a hole? What is that hole going to do for you? If you start with the reason for the sound you want to make then you choose a tool that allows you to direct yourself into that purpose. You start with the ‘why’ and the tool will follow. The tools don’t matter. Yeah, that’s my answer. [laughs]

Todd L. Burns

We still have time for one more.

Robert Rich

See if we can squeeze these two.

Audience Member

OK, I’ll be brief. You mentioned listening to these radio show in midnight on those halcyon days. I sum up all the talk about magic and spirituality, and toxic media and toxic music. I think of this show as a Bay Area show, like spreading good vibes to sensitive people.

Robert Rich

A bit of that, yeah. [laughs]

Audience Member

I’m a radio DJ. Do you think radio has a role, such as bell tower in a community spreading the gospel? Do you think those responsibilities as a DJ to enhance the vibrations of a whole community, of a whole city?

Robert Rich

I think it can, especially terrestrial radio because it’s communal, it has a space around it. The key to me is that... The idea of the bell tower, it reminds immediately of the sort of idea of a church with a message coming from above down. What I like about community radio is that it’s not like that. It’s actually people sharing their passion with other people. Like college radio, a bunch of students and a bunch of people who hang out, they share their love of music and they get everybody excited. And it’s really a sharing, it’s like cooking for each other. It’s not a bell tower, it’s actually a commune. It’s something a lot more fun. It’s a poetry reading. Do you know what I mean? It’s really a coffee shop. It’s not like a high-order sacred message. I much prefer that low-level sharing of excitement and passion. I love terrestrial radio, and I hope it survives. The Internet is wonderful, but there’s no real community when the person who likes your Facebook page is in Greece or Czechoslovakia or China. There’s a kind of community, a different kind, a good one and that’s excellent because then I can meet those people here. I doubt that in Japan, I’ll meet any of my Facebook friends except the ones that I met for this thing. That’s so artificial. This is real and that’s what I love. Yeah, one last one there.

Audience Member

I actually think I answered it. Thought it through and then I don’t have any [questions anymore].

Robert Rich

OK. What were you thinking?

Audience Member

In relation to that I was going to ask, do the tools ever... So the tool doesn’t guide you?

Robert Rich

Sure it does sometimes. Anybody who says it doesn’t is lying but that’s one reason why you want to limit your tools. If you have too many tools, then you don’t know where to go. What’s good is that if you choose to paint in oils on canvas, it will force you to make certain decisions over a certain time. If you choose to paint in watercolors, you’re going to do a certain kind of thing. If you choose to have every one of them right next to you all at once, you’re not going to do know where to start. Yes, the tools do limit you and limits are good. But if you start with purpose, and then pick a few tools that you play with. Then you’ll probably get more done. Yeah. OK.

Todd L. Burns

Well, Robert will be around if anyone else has questions. For now, thank you very much Robert Rich.

[standing applause]

Robert Rich

Thank you! [gestures / bows]

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