Robert Rich

Robert Rich started wiring up his own analog synthesizers at thirteen - which, in 1976, meant building without much of a map. Over the following five decades he released more than sixty albums that pushed ambient music into stranger and darker territory, working with homemade instruments, just intonation tuning, and feedback networks that follow their own logic rather than the genre's safer conventions. His Sleep Concerts, first performed in the early 1980s while he was studying psychology and computer music at Stanford, ran through the night as audiences dozed in sleeping bags and woke to piano solos and tea - a format he has revived for venues from Tokyo to Krakow. His 2001 release Somnium, seven continuous hours of sound spread across a single DVD, remains one of the longest single compositions in recorded music.