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With each successive collaboration Robert Rich & Markus Reuter move closer to the voices coaxing them from the wilderness. The dreamy nocturnal poetry of their Incubation (63:34) seems lit from within. Conveying delight, wonder and nostalgia it feels rooted equally in memory and imagination. For those willing to follow the music this album will take you places more common Ambient rarely goes. With understated precision our duo utilizes digital, electronic, and acoustic sources to create realizations so human and surreal. Enchanting across all 12 tracks Incubation resists scientific readings. Distinctively luxuriant, it means to darken not dispel. As moonlight heightens a sense of seduction Rich & Reuter invite the listener to invent a narrative, and leave ample room for mental creation and flights of fancy. While Reuter's fine lead lines offer a still center, Rich's vividly expressive timbres and tones expand such sonic dimensions and scale. Suggesting, but not telling a story these companions craft with remarkable freedom. Do the flutes, piano, synths and guitar belong to the musicians, or to our dreams? Where uncoiling snakes carry menace the aural landscape is imbued with a fascinating luminosity and strangeness - culminating in a beautifully abundant realm of sound. In such moments we sense the source of a mysterious power. From its wandering focus and doomed hopefulness, to a bracing immediacy and the lingering consolation of the spirit we recognize that Incubation is not so unearthly, as it is wholly of our world - of its lesser known, but more mystical, magical regions.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 11 December 2025 |
