Robert Schwarz

In The Scale of Things Robert Schwarz relies on evocative and enveloping patterns, with strong explorations of natural environments. The implications of the field recordings are given room to develop, but this is balanced with musicality and a pre-arranged structure. Seven tightly worked compositions reverberate here with a particular and abstract essence that is not easy to decipher.Distantly rooted in musique concrète, ”The Scale Of Things” discloses an uncanny, multilayered sonic universe of its own. The seven compositions are based on the exploration of nature recordings for unheard details and hidden layers, focused on patterns of stochastic order and unique chaos created without musical intention. The harmony we hear is the harmony of overwhelming and collective uncertainty, because this nature is chaos.

Audio transformations that remain hidden, accompanied by modular synthesizers purposely blur most links to the “real” world, in favor of a strange and poetic realm, following the erratic patterns of nature. Mesmerizing and disturbing at the same time, an ambivalent dualism emerges of a strange world that is dissolving and not dissolving. A world that can only be described by it’s surface. Expulsed from nature, as our brain is expulsed from nature.

Field recordings from Bale, La Gomera, Mmabolela, Naxos, Vienna and Yangshuo.  Edition of 300 copies.