Description
PRE-ORDER ITEM — EXPECTED TO ARRIVE BY DECEMBER 4, 2026. Any regular in-stock items ordered at the same time (purchased in the same shopping cart today) will be held aside and sent with your pre-ordered goods as one shipment. Orders with multiple pre-order items will be sent as one order, when everything in the order is in stock. If you want the order to ship immediately, or want your pre-ordered items to be sent out as soon as they arrive here, rather than in a group, you must order them separately. PAYMENT WILL BE TAKEN WHEN YOU COMPLETE CHECKOUT.
With Ritual and Radio Waves on the Plains of Elysium, his second album for Unexplained Sounds Group, Rapoon conjures the vast, open spaces of the American deserts and plains, translating the experience of crossing those landscapes into sound. The music captures the hypnotic rhythm of endless travel, where time loses its grip and the scenery becomes a continuous, shifting presence: brief flashes of towns, gas stations, roadside stops, night skies, and distant radio frequencies drifting in and out of range. There is a paradox at the heart of the work, that sensation of moving through unfamiliar territory while carrying an unshaken sense of identity and belonging. The earth itself becomes home, a familiar ground beneath an open sky, and the listener is drawn into that same feeling of rootedness in motion.
Limited edition of 150 copies.
Review in Bad Alchemy
With Ritual and radio waves on the plains of Elysium (USG123), Robin Storey aka RAPOON takes us on the road in the USA. Highways, plains, deserts, vast open spaces, gas stations, desolate half towns. More life dwells in a fantasy that has Charles Ives as its travel guide. Solemn trumpets search in vain (‘A calling search’, ‘Bring choirs and horns’) and miss a great deal. The bison on the prairies, a time before the “Ugly American”? The water under the salt: ‘Lost seas’. A vague beat rattles and clacks, the wind blurs voices, the wheels loop and loop. The air itself groans, carrying a dark breath of flute or coyote wail, tower clock chimes, the faint call of a trumpet. What is missed: the once envisioned City upon the Hill? Sound, dark and melancholy like French horns, duduk and tárogató, fills the sky with a tapping tabla loop, crashing cymbal and cascading strings. ‘Lost’ is the feeling that belongs to it. Even the angel choirs are stuck in a locked groove. With xylophone percussion and shreds of song, Rapoon makes even dreaming something missed, and with flute, stutter, trombones and a sublime choir, ‘So many things’. Elysium for the heroes and the rich, Tartarus for the losers and the poor, or the earth turned into hell. Despite breakbeats and a rumbling stampede, no trace of growing light. Rapoon still rhymes ‘A gaining light’ with ‘Hearing tide’, with a beat treading in place and horns tooting in sad tristesse on the shore. Over surging strings come female vocals and a growling muezzin. In a canon of rosy tongues sounds ‘A voice of dawn’, and in whatever language, this longing and futility are understood everywhere. [BA136 rbd]
Track list:
1. A calling search 07:17
2. Enactment 06:17
3. Lost seas 10:28
4. Bring choirs and horns 05:43
5. Awaken dreams 05:36
6. So many things 06:53
7. A gaining light
8. Hearing tide
9. A voice of dawn
