ROCKETS, UNTO THE EDGES OF EDG

In his most intimate and forceful recording in years Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner maneuvers across fresh terrain that embraces the traditional - guitar, vocals and string arrangements, and the more eclectic  hundreds of found voices, radar transmissions and environmental recordings. Opening the album with Sans Soleil, featuring Michael Gira (Swans, Angels of Light) on guitar, Scanner sings for the first time on his album, his voice hovering through a barren landscape of fragile loops and harmonies. Crisp distressed melodies with crushingly fat beats unite in Pietas Ilulia to map a cinematic landscape populated by N.E.R.D by way of Robert Fripp and John Barry. Anna Livia Plurabelle paints an achingly melancholic picture through which celebrated Mumbai born soprano Patricia Rozario soars and flies with a radiant timbre. Having effectively been the muse for British composer John Taverner for some years, Rozario brings a dexterity and humane conviction to this electronic soundscape. The ghostly presence of William Burroughs and philosopher Bertrand Russell weave their way through some of the pieces, opening into the dark heart of Yellow Plains Under White Hot Blue Sky, an epic, almost menacing work, with corrosive voices, noises and abstract shapes over a primordial electronic beat, that continues to build and ignite with bowed strings into a picturesque precise explosion. The Last European casts phonetic Croatian and Korean into a rhythmic bed of pulses and instrumental melodies, tripping through itchy rhythms that entangle themselves upon one another, whilst A Clearing Between Earth and Air closes the album with a highly organic and textured mix of voices, drifting harmonies and Krautrock pulses, breeding a drifting melancholy from the union of voice and electronic and acoustic instrumentation. By far his most mature and personally sombre album, Rockets is in equal parts sumptuous and achingly beautiful, sentimental and exploratory. Jean Baudrillard once depicted paradise as mournful, a fitting location for this ravishing soundtrack.