Reviews:

Despite numerous CDs and compilation appearances, Rapoon remain a marginal presence: fringe operators adrift in their own encrypted and hermetic world. Their 'warped by widescreen' sound takes off from Robin Storey's ethnically tinged tenure with :zoviet*france:, all tape-layer collision and the dark throb and delay of haunted studio space. While :Easterly 6 Or 7: isn't exactly the clarion call their catalogue surely needs, you'd be hard pushed to find a more comfortable head envelope.

At times reminiscent of This Heat, Rapoon stalk similar depths of looped cloud drift and unrestrained despair, kicking in with the disembodied chant of "Sign" proto-tribal samples phased and delayed via chopper-blade stutter effects. "Our Trespasses" is a tabla and drone box driven confessional in which distant muffled trumpet is wrestled to the ground beneath an eyebrow raising (and non-Welsh) take on contemporary John Cale monologues. Drum rituals (to the moon!) snake throughout the set underpinning the likes of "All Criminals" with its Dylan referencing and crescendo wails, and "Blow (Lethal Blow)"'s LaMonte Young-style sopranino serpent charming.

Short-wave radio transmissions lend the space a nowhere air: remote broadcasts from elsewhere, as in the closing "Rattling Sabres" where Gulf War flashes jitter beyond the proto-Sun City Girls flamenco stagger and eventually demolish the track completely. It's as fine a dawn chorus as any.

review by David Keenan
The Wire magazine (issue # 161)
The Wire on-line index

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Robin Storey, the mastermind behind Rapoon, somehow manages to name each disc with a title that completely resonates with the music. "Easterly 6 or 7" has a total movement/journey/landscape sort of thing going on. Each piece feels like your are either looking out into the distance of some unknown direction, or that you are traveling into a new place at all times. The cycling, primitive percussion hidden under airy drones and trances has rhythmic feel to it, like footsteps, the gallop of a horse, the click-clack of a train on its tracks. You don't meet even a single person on this journey, every place is singular and desolate, the shadows of strange faces that were in this place are all that's left. Listening to Rapoon is like remembering things that never happened and people you never met.

review from the Manifold Records catalog

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Being familiar with Robin Storey's enthusiasm for Shamanic ritual, I gloomily expected my first encounter with Rapoon to be a sanitized fourth world excursion. I should have known better. This is music with a very well developed sense of dislocation: eerie choral effects riding trancey grooves; the familiar strangeness of the shipping news emerging from a murk of drones and overtones. At times the nebulous sounds detach themselves from the idea of human agency and take on the character of abandoned objects being sounded by the wind. If the music of Rapoon is inspired by shamanic traditions then Storey understands the dark truth about those experiences and their cost to the shaman; an individual ravaged by years of psychotropic intake and dream journeying. The unremittingly bleak vistas of this music evoke the nightmare aspect of such journeys while the softly echoing percussion loops and barely audible vocals create the sense of a great drama unfolding elsewhere; maybe beyond the schism that divides the lands of the living and the dead.

review by Andrew McDuffy
copyright Immerse Sound(e)scapes

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Even for the quality, breadth and emotion of Rapoon music, this is a masterpiece. Featuring 9 tracks over 75 minutes, the main focus is on carefully constructed layers of purposefully cosmic music consisting of deep bass undercurrents, flowing drifting, ethereal, haunting, beautiful synths and electronics, sparsely and effectively used samples and beyond. The music has vast depths, a feel of calm, and yet somehow threatening, the atmospheric equivalent of drifting out to sea on a boat close to the shore on a clam sea, watching a silent and unthreatening fog bank slowly rolling in.. There is rhythm deep within the music, sometimes there, sometimes implied and, on one track in particular, an integral part of the percussive backdrop. But, overall, this is a vast, enthralling, warm-hearted voyage into the unknown - a space journey where none have gone before, serene yet eerie. The tracks flow and evolve, always changing over the well played and arranged stream of ideas. A staggering feat of restrained cosmic ambience for the '90's, very atmospheric in different ways when played quietly or loud. Timeless.

review by Andrew Garibaldi
CD Services, Dundee

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Just Like Old Times

About 7 years ago I discovered :zoviet*france:. It was the "music" I had been waiting for all my life--it changed my sense of "music," of the appreciation of sound, in a fundamental and permanent way. For nine solid months, I steeped myself thoroughly and exclusively in "Mohnomishe," "Shadow, Thief of the Sun," "Look Into Me," and "Shouting at the Ground." In the car, at home as I read, in my Walkman as I worked, it was a continuous backdrop. When I emerged, I perceived all other "styles" of "music"--"rock", "country", "alternative", "rap", "classical," "world", "jazz", "polka", etc.--as being essentially the same, all equally shallow, tinny, and preposterous. This effect has worn off somewhat, but my soul is still firmly attached to :zoviet*france:. I despaired when I realized that :zoviet*france: was no more, but brightened when I found that its guiding light--Robin Storey--continued his explorations under the guise of Rapoon. I like Rapoon--a lot--but most of what I have heard has diverged from :zoviet*france:'s original vision, it seems to me, and the experience is basically different. But this work, Easterly 6 or 7, is like a cool breeze from the past: the sound and feel is precisely back in :zoviet*france: territory, with a smidgen of Rapoon mysticism edging the borders. It has become an instant "old friend."

review from Amazon.com (August 23, 1998)

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Soleilmoon Press Release:

Rapoon is Robin Storey, a founder and former member of :zoviet*france:. Over the last four years he has released four full-length CDs, a double CD, two seven inch singles and a DAT. Rapoon's music is not just a continuation of musical lines set out by :zoviet*france:, but expanding it into his own unique musical language.

Easterly 6 or 7, Rapoon's latest studio album is more ambient (oops...excuse), but the ambience inhabited by a dark light. More so than on most of his previous releases voices are used, sung by the Moroccan singer Khadija Lourlham (although still kept to a minimum). Wordless, but adding much atmosphere.

Easterly 6 or 7 is a long mantra of percussional music, a gentle invitation for relaxation and contemplation.

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I've enjoyed Robin Storey's prolific post-:zoviet*france: project since its 1992 debut, Dream Circle, but even as a fan, I have to admit that there is a "heard one, heard 'em all" sameness running through the many Rapoon releases. While his contemporaries working in the experimental ethno-ambient genre progressed, Storey seemed stuck in a rut, so I decided it would be best to take a break from his last couple of efforts. Listening to this disc, however, I can't help wondering what I missed. While the basic elements remain the same - loops and drones, Arabic vocal samples, and other Middle Eastern flavourings - Storey's palette of sound seems to have expanded, the dark ambience of the work is also more prominent, with several tracks building into beatless, almost sinister soundscapes. I think it's time that I give the back catalogue another listen.

review by Greg Clow of Feedback Monitor
written for Chart (November 1997)