By Nick Ostrum
Rick Reger is an electronic musician and keyboardist from Chicago. His resume is relatively short, though it includes collaborations with Ken Vandermark and Tim Daisy. Over the last decade, he has released a lot of isolated tracks via his Bandcamp page. As far as I can tell, however, this is his first proper solo release, and certainly his first on Aural Terrains.
As with other releases on the label, the title is almost mechanically descriptive: Textures and Tonalities for Analogue Synthesizers and Percussion. Although accurate, that title implies something cold and sterile, some type of academic music for academics. Textures and Tonalities contains nothing of the sort. Instead, Reger deploys an array of vintage equipment (Arp 2600, VCS3, Moog Voyager, Fender Rhodes, Mellotron, Roland C-30 digital celeste) and percussion to create generally warm soundscapes. This is experimental. Think Kraftwerk’s abstract early work right after they took the plunge into cybernetics.
The soundscapes are characterized as much by space as they are by resonance. Metallic noises, shuttering coils, scraping shrapnel, and aerophonic pitches bounce back and forth. So too do acoustic elements: various singing bowls, a rain stick, an earthy rustling in the fourth track, and heavy gongs, especially on the first track. The latter is not quite on visceral level of Tatsuya Nakatani’s gong work, which one can literally feel throughout their body, but this is moving in that direction. Naturally, as much as this involves extended sonorities, so too does it feature sound decay. The dynamics involve density and textural changes rather than speed. Reger also does well playing with mood. He balances grandiosity (big, hollow rumbles) with fine, quiet details (the changing pitches of the otherwise dronal hum behind them). He adds Close Encounters keys implying, maybe, but otherwise stripped of the melody. Frequently this leads to disorientation and disconcertion, though many of the tones are also warming and comforting. One imagines this would sound incredible in a capacious cavern or gallery space, or just in some dark, dank, hole-in-the-wall club somewhere. It could turn the interior space into that of a tardis.
Textures and Tonalities for Analogue Synthesizers and Percussion is available as a download and CD from Bandcamp: