Biography: Robin Storey. Aka Rapoon.

For almost 30 years now Robin Storey has been releasing music recognized worldwide as innovative and influential. Firstly as a founder member of the groundbreaking and much lauded band Zoviet France and latterly as the solo musician and multimedia artist Rapoon.

From 1979-1992 Storey was a co-founder member of Zoviet France and was personally responsible for much of the music and imagery associated with the band during the period that is seen as their most productive and influential.

From 1992 to the present day Storey has released a huge back catalogue of recordings and gained an international reputation as an experimental artist/musician in his own right.

Storey trained as a fine artist from 1973-1977 and gained his degree: BA hons: Fine Art from Sunderland School of Art in 1997. (Despite this being a fine art degree Storey also managed to study and train as an avant garde composer during these years under the tutelage of Dave Pinder, a contemporary modernist composer.

He then trained and eventually taught, as a printmaker and graphic artist at Charlotte press workers co-operative in Newcastle Upon Tyne.(1977-1989)

Graphic art and printmaking were defining elements in the early Zoviet France releases which included hand made sleeves with strong graphic imagery.

From 1979 to 1994 Storey worked as a full-time and  freelance audio/visual technician for local AV companies . During this time he learned skills such as rostrum camera work , video editing and slide animation . All of these skills were transported into his own visual work and incorporated into his artistic output.

From 1979- 1994 Storey exhibited his visual work widely and internationally. These included touring exhibitions of the former USSR and the USA.

Post 1994 Storey concentrated on his musical output and has to date released almost 40 solo recordings as Rapoon and numerous other collaborations and side projects including Reformed Faction with Mark Spybey and Hank and Slim with Nigel Ayers.

Other works include a couple of best selling sound design loop libraries for Sony Media:

Rapoon: Sci-Fi Tribal

Robin Storey's genius is pristine, uncluttered by the extraneous influences of time and change. His history with the UK industrial underground ensemble :zoviet-france: is still a controversial topic in alternative music, and his massive catalog of solo releases as Rapoon is revered by ambient and experimental music listeners worldwide. The Sci-Fi Tribal collection is Robin's second Sony® Sound Series™ loop library, and the next step in a personal evolution of music that is firmly grounded in a well-established aesthetic that is becoming even more evocative and compelling. The spaces between Robin's mesmerizing loop points are filled with strange combinations of ethnic instruments, assorted noisemakers, found objects, obscure sound bites, and severe processing. The Sci-Fi Tribal library is a gateway to moods and atmospheres that will make lasting impressions on the listener, and a fine library that will fit easily into the tool kits of producers working in nearly every music genre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Storey has also produced music for soundtracks for a number of independent films including award winning films by Randy Greif  "The Three Trials"

and "Effaced" by Nadine Shamounki.

In 2003 Storey returned to University and in 2004 attained a Masters Degree in Creative Music technology at Newcastle University.

In the past year or two Storey has returned to his visual work and released his first full length DVD in 2005 and continues to paint.

The prospect of exhibiting again is something that appeals to Storey.

In 2007 Storey began to write his first short novel .

He continues to work and explore in multi-media.

Robin Storey always has enough on his plate, certainly. When not busy with his post-Zoviet France project Reformed Faction, he manages to find the time to export additional bidimensional missives from the psyche as the ever-morphing Rapoon. Eclectic in the extreme, never content with glib reiterations of what has long been a dense, regenerative, percussive enterprise, Storey’s Rapoon works seem to only get more and more thematically rich with each successive volume. Inspired by the hauntological environs of a particularly remote area of Northern England where he was raised, Storey has realized within the liquid looped aquifers of Dark Rivers one of his spookiest, most disquieting works to date. Where many might take the well-trodden path—usually some ultra-minimal ambient drone pastiche supersoaked in reverb—Storey mirrors the aberrant history and mystery of his “homelands” in spectacular, if subtle, fashion. Gone are the mutant faux African/Middle Eastern/Arabic labyrinthine loops of works like Raising Earthly Spirits; Storey’s on a different mission here, capturing in aural photograph—using half-glimpsed beat structures, billowing ancestral winds, séance-conjured voices, and rippling, strangely distorted electronics—the twilight zone veneer shadowing his hallucinogenic stomping grounds. Eerie, as on a darkling plain, Dark Rivers is a majestic, uncompromising, under-your-skin sonic fiction utterly arresting in its picturesque ambience. DARREN BERGSTEIN, Signal to Noise Magazine #54, Summer 2009

The Wire march 2006

RAPOON

ALIEN GLYPH MORPHOLOGY

CACIOCAVALLO DVD BY DEREK WALMSLEY

Robin Storey's work as Rapoon has never been secretive - he interviews regularly and at length

- but his total disinterest in electronic genre tropes can suggest a lone psychonaut operating in a sealed hermetic bubble. It's a practical rather than political choice - his mapless journeys through dense atmospheres and parallax echoes require Storey's gentle, intuitive hand on the tiller, rather than the structured exchange of collaboration. Despite producing visual work for many years, a fastidious respect for the demands of his art and music - which "occupy different sets of attention and mindset"

- has prevented him until now from mixing media. It's only to be expected, then, that Alien Glyph Morphology provides next to no information on the hows, wheres and whens of the seven short films contained on the DVD;

hitting play simply opens a new portal on Storey's meticulous sense-networks.

Rapoon's music has a strange timewarping effect, a Deep Listening wormhole that puts you in a blissful perpetual state of cognitive play. Rather than attempting to replicate the mantra quality with some sort of hypnotic, retina burning lightshow, the defining quality of his films is luscious texture and suggestive symbolism. Warm, analogue background hues flicker like ghosts caught on film; the Miro-like moving sketches on top are floating markers of unconscious energy. The visual dimension of Alien Glyph Morphology gives the music even more licence to roam - spare, enlightened Jon Hassell-like passages sit side by side with sample transmissions akin to Cabaret Voltaire's Attic Tapes.

The main challenge of this marvellous release is how to tune out the outside world and properly immerse yourself in Storey's dislocated trance states; rather than having to peer into a TV or monitor, it would be even better if these images could flow unrestrained across cinema screens and gallery walls.

The New York Times
Rapoon: Alien Glyph Morphology
2005-USA-Abstract Film/New Age & Metaphysics/Ambiance/Instrumental Music
DVD REVIEW
From All Movie Guide: Ambient music mainstay Rapoon (aka Robin Storey) offers a look at his more visual side in this release featuring six of the versatile artist's seldom-seen short films. By utilizing a wide variety of visual techniques including slides, slow motion, and montage, Rapoon offers the ideal visual counterpart to the rich and textured sounds of his atmospheric audio landscapes. An additional short film entitled Shadow and two slide shows round out the release, and a limited addition set of twenty Tarot cards painted by Rapoon are included while supplies last. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide