Temple of the Invisible

Robert Rich

May 1, 2003

Ambient / Electronic

Document of a lost ritual. =================== Edits from an article by Derk Richardson for SF Gate: Musical Archeology .... Robert Rich's Temple of the Invisible is harder to pin down. Rich's Web site describes the music as "a document from a distant time and place, a lost culture with musical underpinnings that reach from Java to North Africa, from Medieval Europe to the Tibetan Plateau," with each of the album's seven pieces further documenting "part of a lost ritual, with mythical and spiritual components conveyed through a strangely familiar yet foreign musical language, as if unearthed from an ancient common ancestry." Playing flutes, zither, prepared piano, mallet kalimba and a variety of percussion, Rich recruited a mixed musical family of friends to join him on his journey: Sukhawat Ali Khan contributes impassioned Indian vocals; widely traveled virtuoso Paul Hanson plays bassoon and bombard (an obscure oboe-like reed); Forrest Fang plugs the bouzouki-like baglama and the ancient Chinese zither known as the gu zheng; Tom Heasley, known for his ambient tuba work, adds voice and conch shell; and Percy Howard, of Meridiem fame, deepens the textures with his post-operatic vocals. As with every Rich production, the attention to sonic detail gives new meaning to obsessiveness. Few studio technicians can match Rich's mastery of sound placement and the complex relationships between aural foreground and background, while keeping the focus on musical content. Temple of the Invisible sounds like nothing -- and a little bit of everything -- you've heard before. "I've been interested in musical archeology for some time," Rich explained in a recent e-mail exchange, "often ponder what the music would have sounded like in vanished cultures. It makes me aware of the fragility of our own musical heritage. ... Also I have long loved the music of Harry Partch, which somehow invents a culture of its own. "For years now I have been playing around with trying to assemble a small ensemble to invent music from pre-Hellenic cultures," he continues, "perhaps even pre-Sumerian Akkadian. Not exactly an archaeological forgery, it would be more like a question posed to history, projecting a 'possible' language into the past." The project, Rich explained, would be called "Rites of the Bronze Age." But as it would take too long to realize, he scaled back to "trying to make a very personal music from my own vocabulary, which nevertheless sounds like it came from somewhere else ... By including the contributions of other musicians with mastery in some different styles, especially Sukhawat Ali Khan and Forrest Fang, I was able to pull the sound a bit away from my own personal vocabulary and give it a taste of authenticity." Rich chose the instruments by imagining the sounds of his invented culture, consciously avoiding "some instruments that have too much of a specific cultural reference, or have become clichéd by recent 'world music' overuse, such as didgeridoo or gamelan." The players came individually to his studio in Mountain View and improvised on the tracks initially laid down by Rich, who then edited it all together, giving the resultant pieces titles from a made-up language, such as "Etranon," "Pa Tanak," "Fasanina" and "Lan Tiku." "I have a vague libretto in my head," the composer/producer admits, "but I would rather leave it hidden, to allow other people to imagine their own stories."