Incubation by Robert Rich & Markus Reuter

When Markus stayed with us for a week, after one of his tours got cancelled, we improvised together for hours each day. We recorded our experiments, and we puzzled over the hovering nocturnal mood of our explorations. Of course we were channeling the situation of our lives and of the world, perhaps a dissonance between the realms of comfort and distress, distance from family or a larger distance from our hopes for the human herd.

As artists, we take a shamanic path, and we trend toward the outlying regions of cognition. Our musical mood during these sessions reminded me of the books by Peter Kingsley, about pre-Socratic mystics Parmenides and Empedocles, who’s meditative approach of “incubation” planted a more earthy and subterranean core to ancient European philosophy. Consider this musical excursion as subterranean, seeking balance inside of dark silence. Markus and I share a deep friendship based on searching, questioning, practice, and a sort of alchemical process of creating things that never existed before, from within our life journeys.

Robert Rich has helped define ambient and electronic music, with over 60 albums across five decades. Rich began building his own analog modular synthesizers in 1976, when he was 13, and later studied computer music at Stanford's CCRMA while researching lucid dreaming. Rich performs and lectures worldwide. His all-night Sleep Concerts have become legendary.

robertrich.com