"Time had no meaning. It was gone. The dust of it lay at my feet, disturbed now and again by strange winds that eddied around the ancient rocks I stood upon. The sky if one could call it that, threw fitful spasms of light and dark. The fires of the borderlands."

Reviews:

The Fires of the Borderlands

Press Release (Release)

"Some have it, and some don't. Robin Storey, both a founding member of the legendary :zoviet*france: and the mastermind behind Rapoon, clearly 'has it'. Everything I've heard from him is distinguished by its striking consistency and clarity of purpose... Superficially, you could label Rapoon's music 'ambient industrial' with an occasional touch of ethnic (eg. tabla and oud samples). But all these ingredients are in common use today; it's the choices Storey makes that set him apart." - Bill Tilland / Alternative Press

Robin Storey has released six Rapoon albums on Staalplaat / Soleilmoon since his departure from :zoviet*france:. Release Entertainment is proud to release his seventh, The Fires of the Borderlands. Awe-inspiring ambience melds with ethnic percussive loops and dark, undulating industrial sensibilities to form an eleven-piece composition evoking spiritual musical stimulation.

Words cannot possibly do this music justice.

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Founded in 1992, Rapoon is the solo project of :zoviet*france: member, Robin Storey. Fires of the Borderlands is his seventh release under this monicker to date. Following a more mellow approach to his previous works, Rapoon offers ambience in its rawest sense. Storey uses minimal percussion, combined with dark, droning synths and loops, to create extremely rich soundscapes. Most of the tracks on Fires of the Borderlands follow a similar direction: moody, atmospheric compositions worthy of any film noir soundtrack. Fans of Storey's previous work with :zoviet*france:, as well that bands other spin-offs such as Mark Spybey's Dead Voices on Air, and Dan Ponten's Horizon 222 will find this record to be a great example of their talent for experimental ambience.

reviewed by Ben Schingel
The Industrial Bible May 1998

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Ever since Robin Storey left :zoviet*france:, he has been quite busy, putting seven albums under his belt in the past three years. Despite all his musical expedience not a single release is boring or stagnant. The music seems to flow continuously from Robin's fingertips and "The Fires of the Borderlands" is no exception to this rule. This time around, Robin works with much thicker ambient tones than previous albums. The richness of the bass and depth of layering is evident on 'Hollow Flights' and 'Snake of Earth' bringing to mind other Dark Ambient masters like Brian Lustmord and Robert Rich. Robin treats these deep tones as if they are malleable as clay, reworking and reinterpreting the sounds with only minor molding. As with all Rapoon releases, this album is best experienced with a pair of expensive speakers, a massive stereo system, and a broadband equalizer to rein the abundant frequencies into something the human ear can truly appreciate.

Rapoon is: Robin Storey

Sonic-Boom
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He may be too humble to admit it, but Rapoon's Robin Storey was the real creative force behind :zoviet*france:. The cover art and special packaging were his designs, the credit for which was the sticking point when the split came. Since then it has been obvious that Robin was the key to their sound as well - Rapoon has been much more prolific than ZF (who at this point have only gone on to release one studio recording, Digilogue). Now, for only the second time Storey has recorded for a company outside the Staalplaat / Soleilmoon alliance. Release is lucky to get The Fires Of The Borderlands, which is perhaps his best recording to date. Right from the start, with the swelling choral sounds of "Hollow Flight," the otherworldly invocations of Rapoon set in with his trademark wall-of-echo ambience. This time, voices are the source for his abstracted sound, like the male opera singer that gets treated and delayed into a discord on "Deserted Shadows." Maybe it is Storey himself who provides the vocals on "Looking...Not Finding" that become the reverbed sound walls within which his low voice and flute circle. Storey's low-tech meditations always had it over the gear-heavy productions of the mainstream of "ambient" artists, who overlooked the simple power of evocative loops.

New Powers Music
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With music so subtle you might forget you put the disc on, Rapoon's Robin Storey has made perhaps one of the least rhythmic albums of his prolific career. The Fires of the Borderlands zeros in on earthy sonic intrigues -- these are the kind of lie-down-with-the-lights-off soundscapes healthy people should embrace for a score to meditational activities, yoga or colonic irrigations, rather than the airbrushed-frolicking-unicorn pap still preferred.

review by Erin Hawkins
Spin Cycle (April 1998)
from Eye Magazine

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The pieces on The Fires of the Borderlands, to me, conjure mental images of desolate places of natural, though foreboding, beauty... jagged mountain faces, choppy seas under cold, grey skies, lifeless expanses of tundra. The occasional inclusion of monk-like chants (no, not even remotely Enigma-like) seem to intimate a Tibetan region, perhaps.

The disc opens to the vast, slowly roiling sonic vortex which is Hollow flight. Strings accent the swirl, which seems to contain transmuted human voices. Rising and falling, the thick waves of Groundswell surge powerfully, yet placidly. Soothing, yet menacing, if that's possible. The sound of clanging bells seems to have been stretched and looped in Cires divam, and a lone monk's voice shifts in and out of the trance-inducing pattern. Machine-like rhythms stir behind the Snake of earth; strange electric shimmers phase in and out. Billowing like a cloud, the processed voices of Omaneska swirl hazily to be underscored by a mechanical drone and string. This almost-14-minute track develops further as deeper tones well up from beneath while everything else fades away, creating a gorgeously somber valley of sound. Eventually, the strings return, blowing in like an icy wind cutting across a mountain top. Deserted shadows is an appropriate enough title for the ominously quiet shades which hang in this atmosphere. Another machine-like presence develops, dispassionately pumping away, then fading in a high-toned haze. Looking... not finding plumbs the murky depths of a distorted monk vocal and horn. Imagine a landscape painting with the shapes and colors so smeared and slurred around that the original forms are only barely perceptible. This track also, toward its end, incorporates an electro-mechanical drone, which abruptly cuts off. Circling globes seems to again play shape-shifting games with the human voice, elongating the sounds to unreal proportions and intertwining them with dark synth drones. Spooky, but lovely! The 3:32 Talking to a stick establishes a relatively rapid clatter and overlays it with electronic organ bursts. Still, so still seems to be the confluence of two streams of sound; one a deep, droning flow, the other a cyclic female chant. These two forces flow steadily until in the latter part, tension rises, becoming louder just before dissipating. Perhaps the most straightforwardly pretty track, A softer light slowly gels. Simple notes (much like the standard clock "tune") are surrounded by a light haze, then a growing swell, which, in its final phase, turns almost musical before fading out with few final "words".

Haunting and stark, yet wondrous, The Fires of the Borderlands casts a flickering light on some of the darkened corners of our world. I'm giving it a rock-solid One Thumb Up. (It's better than that really; would have been Two, but something about the repetitive nature of loops holds me back...)

review by Link O'Rama (aka David Opdyke)
AmbiEntance

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The first Rapoon CD to appear outside the hyperium of Soleilmoon and Staalplaat in many years, and on a label that we didn't expect to do this sort of thing. Relapse are otherwise known for their noise infused discs using guitars or feedback. Now be warned: Rapoon just does precisely what he is good at: the production of ultra dark ambient music. The ever-present drones are there, and there is an increasing interest in using voices, sometimes like a far away Gregorian chant, as on 'Cires Divam'. There is an almost divine atmosphere to be found here, divineness and isolation are the two words that can capture Rapoon's music best. And music wise Robin Storey stays closest to the original zoviet*france sound as heard on the Just An Illusion CD.

review by Frans de Waard
Vital Weekly (116)

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After a very long time of releasing full-lengths only on one label, this one release on Relapse / Release is just about our favorite. The way pieces flow one into another is just remarkable. Not since O Yuki Conjugates 'Equator' or A Small Good Things 'Slim Westerns' has a disc of organic ambient been weaved into itself so well. At all times in this disc one feels as if they are looking out over a broad plain from atop a mountain, with the eyes of an eagle, seeing even the tiniest movement of a mouse in the weeds a mile away, or a rippling creek near the horizon. An army gathers somewhere, a wildfire rages out of control on the borderlands, the clouds move in from the north. All this is so far away that its silent, but the orchestrated sight of it has its own sound and music. We play this thing very often here, even though its not the newest release by Rapoon. If you don't have it yet, don't wait.

review from the Manifold Records catalog

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In case you didn't know, Rapoon is basically the project of Robin Storey, a founder member of :zoviet*france:. When Rapoon first appeared with a release on Staalplaat I was quite impressed by what I heard, and it seemed obvious as to who was the brains behind :zoviet*france:'s best record Gris. Subsequent Rapoon discs, however, moved towards dancey techno realms, with looping beats and such-like, so I lost interest. Thus, this CD came as quite a surprise, in that it returns to the original Rapoon starting point, with an even greater venture into dark weird surreal music's, feeling like a Brian Eno "Music For Nightmares" it's so spooky.

review by Alan Freeman for Audion #40 (August 1998)
P.O. Box 225
Leicester, LE2 1DX
England
phone - 0116 285 4545
fax - 0116 285 4555

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If this does not warm your heart, there's no saving you. A massive 11 tracker featuring a multi-layered / textured set of largely rhythm free soundscapes that go on for miles and surround you in a cocoon of sonic beauty. Yet there is a mystery, an ethereal quality and an edge to the, technically, cosmic music that unfolds as the banks of synths and synth choirs, allied to meticulous detail from occasionally used textural percussion, flow with purpose and change shape as they travel so that the scenery appears like a journey in slow motion which has you rapt in positive awe throughout its length. The 13+ minute track 5 is a truly majestic piece of cosmic splendour that drifts and flows effortlessly from booming bass synth icebergs to space music that could be straight out of any first rate sci-fi film for atmospheric quality. The monk-like choir on track 7 lends a mystical air to the piece which develops into yet another masterpiece of cosmic music but the sort that you will play to death for a long time to come and in no way the sweet and sugary stuff that has been done to death on the 'trad' synth scene. This is space synth music with gothic qualities that moves in ways you cannot imagine and scales heights of immense pleasure. A magnificent album.

review by Andrew Garibaldi
CD Services, Dundee

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Perfect

This is one of those wonderful recordings that must be listened to loud, alone and with the lights turned out late at night. The three samples above are indicative of the entire recording. Is the music repetitive? I suppose so, but therein lies its beauty - the listening to the multiple layers of different sound building and washing over constant drones. It's moving, beautiful and sometimes dark and disturbing - the rewards come after repeated and careful listening.

review from Amazon.com (July 14, 1999)