1. Give some information about yourself, age, where you reside, how long have you been a musician, your training and background in music.
RR: I'm 40, live in the South Bay ("silicon valley"). I have played music since I was about 13, when I started playing piano and building synthesizers from kits. Mostly self-taught aside from viola and choir in gradeschool (doesn't count.) Played noisy experimental music in bands during high school, on the fringes of late '70's San Francisco art-music scene. Started playing solo concerts in 1982, and released albums since then. Studied for a year at Stanford's CCRMA in '84-85, while an undergrad there.
2. Please describe the music you make to our readers, who may know very little about ambient/spacemusic. Include your influences, inspiration etc. Do you make all your music with machines, or do you incorporate traditional instruments?
RR: My music blends acoustic and electronic instruments, often merging instruments and styles from many different cultures. Besides synthesizers, I also play bamboo and homemade flutes, percussion, lap steel guitar, piano and others. Influences include minimalism, world music, 60's-70's krautrock/progressive/psychedelic music and more. American composers Harry Partch and Terry Riley loom large for me. Sound artists such as Bill Fontana, Marianne Amocher, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros helped show ways to use environmental sound as music. Some art-rock, and noise/industrial music inspired me to make music fearlessly, to follow my muse however odd it may seem. I still feel very strong influences from North African, Persian, North Indian and Javanese music, in part for their various ecstatic melodic techniques.
3. What is the role of ambient music? Is it background music, meditative, music for office workers?
RR: It depends upon the piece of music, the artist, and the listener. I don't like to force everything under one umbrella. If you want to keep a strict and narrow definition of ambient music, as Brian Eno coined it, then it would specifically operate as backround music. In that case, a few of my albums might be "ambient" but most of them would not be.
Basically, your question addresses the difference between functional music and "listening" music (or "art music"). Some music might serve specific uses (like meditating, working, shopping, dancing, psychedelics, sex, etc.) and other music better rewards close listening on its own. Some music can do both. I have tended to oscillate between these modes in my own work, and sometimes I try to obfuscate the differences. Of course this can cause confusion among listeners who might be expecting one extreme or the other.
The listener is key here, since recording artists can rarely control how a piece of music gets "used". Minimalist composer Steve Reich once addressed a critique of his own music by pointing out that J.S. Bach can serve as great background music in a restaurant, but that use doesn't render Bach's music trivial. One can also closely listen to Bach emotionally, spritually or analytically, and reap different rewards from the music from each angle.
I tend to make music that has a lot going on under the surface, structural elements like tuning systems, mathematical relationships and symmetries, or metaphorical elements, literary references and such. I think these layers can unfold new ways of hearing a piece after multiple listenings. Yet this same music might work well in the background for certain people.
4. What is the difference between ambient and new age?
RR: It's easy to get bogged down in semantics. Writers tend to think primarily in words, so they feel a need to have a cleanly defined word to apply to groups of different things. I don't feel that need. Furthermore, I tend to think that many musicians fall out from under these categories. I try to treat these words in limited and specific ways, and try to avoid the generic categorizations.
I think of "new age" as a Western cultural-spiritual movement that grew out of the Sixties countercultural interest in world religions, including the tendency to hybridize convenient aspects from various traditions or take them out of context. From this perspective, I would only refer to music as New Age if its composer intended it for use in the context of New Age culture, like meditation, yoga, massage or healing.
I think of "ambient music" specifically in the terms that Eno laid out in the mid-Seventies: background music to create a mood within a physical environment. Much of the music that people call ambient these days isn't intended for the background, it's either downtempo electronic dance music, calm instrumental psychedelia, or simply a composer's personal expression.
An old term like "space music" might work better for some of the recordings that land uncomfortably in the other categories. I like to think this term refers to spaciousness rather than to outer space. I toy around with new invented terms like "mind music", "slow music" (like Slow Food perhaps?), I don't know. New terms never seem to stick well.
5. Describe your relationship with Hearts of Space.
RR: They were my main record label throughout the '90s, and they still keep those titles in print. Valley Entertainment in New York purchased the label from Stephen and Leyla Hill a couple years ago. Stephen Hill has always been a huge supporter of my music, all the way back to 1980 when he played my earliest efforts on his radio show in Berkeley. Much of my music has been too experimental or non-commercial for HOS to release on the label; but we remain friends and he continues to play my recent work on the syndicated show, when he finds a piece that fits.
With the changing fabric of music retail, independent labels can't really make the impact they once had when selling more challenging, non-mainstream music. For this reason I have had better financial results lately with self-released titles, but I am still on cordial terms with Valley/HOS.
6. Can you tell me your thoughts on what Brian Eno terms "generative music." That is, software programs designed to generate music that, in fact, changes or evolves each time it is played.
RR: Personally I have more interest in human expression. I find most alleatoric music to be trivial and tedious. I would rather hear poetic and miraculous personal statements from artists that find the best way to communicate their ideas, than more tedious variations on a collection of spiritless data. I deeply respect Eno's skill as a producer, and as a popularizer of postmodern art theory, but I feel that much of his work lacks the ecstatic dimension that I personally seek in great music. Most alleatoric music (and self-generating art in general) seems like a pointless intellectual game. Generative art usually creates in me a sense of frustrating stasis, despite constantly rearranging the details.
7. Do you see the market for ambient music increasing, staying the same, or decreasing?
RR: I have no idea. Styles come and go and come again. Genre names change. Ironically (if you mean ambient as background music) since background music should not call attention to itself, how do you get people to seek out music that they're supposed to ignore?
My own music tends toward introspection and quiet intensity, not generally mainstream sentiments. Anything quiet tends to get lost in a media marketplace where visibility and high profile win out. The noise floor only increases as the spoils go to the loudest competitors.
8. Do you perform your music live?
RR: Yes, I tour almost every year. I just spent three months on the road this summer, and played to a full house at Morrison Planetarium here in SF back in May.
9. What are your thoughts on the future of music on the Internet? Will CDs eventually be obsolete (lets hope so!)? Will artists rights to their music (and share of profits) be improved as music on the Internet grows.
RR: Let's hope so! Currently the arguments in favor of file-sharing serve the interests of the corporations that offer web services, and the arguments against file-sharing serve the interests of a recording industry that cares very little about the needs of independent artists. Few people seem to be defending the musicians' attempts to make a living from their efforts.
I am hopeful for companies like Emusic and others, who pay artists a fair royalty for downloads, and charge consumers a resonable and affordable subscription price for the service. It seems like a good compromise between radio and hard-copy recordings. Currently, though, streaming royalty rates are lower than typical record sales royalties, so the internet has not repaired the problem of artist compensation.
I am very concerned at the poor sound quality of compressed audio files, since I work hard to make audiophile recordings. Hopefully an improvement in Internet bandwidth will help fix that backstep in the future. Moreover, I regret that the download model tends to remove the talismanic properties of the recorded object. I like to create a beautiful package, with good graphic artwork as well as good music. I like to make something that will last for a long time, and reward multiple listenings. The transitory nature of music downloads seems to trivialize the music. Since I try to make music that rewards extra attention, I want to provide multiple cues to encourage people to exert that attention.
10. Are music providers, like Hearts of Space, the answer, or will they be gobbled up by the big media corporations?
RR: ...or fade away into obscurity because certain styles lack sufficient profitability?
I think we underestimate the value of good radio and good record labels. We live in a media-saturated world, with far too much information ever to digest. We benefit from having filters, agents we can rely on to help us discover new expressions to build meaning in the world. Perhaps the technology of internet search wizards, or similar navigation tools, can help us edit the amount of information that pours in. In the meantime, though, I think it helps to have people who make a living searching out good music and promoting it to the public.
Certainly, the media conglomerates tend to eat anything in sight. However, as they get more bloated and monopolizing, they lose relevance to portions of the culture, and some counterculture expression grows in the fringes. Perhaps that expression won't take the form of music as it did in the Sixties, when the music industry found a way to sell rebellion profitably. Their model for marketing rebellion hasn't changed much since then.
Ambient and space music grew up out of an organic desire, among artists and audience, to hear music that expressed calmness or bliss rather than rebellion, sex, anger, or the typical repetitive breakup/makeup stories of pop music. Likewise, Hearts of Space grew from the grassroots efforts of Stephen Hill. As a label, they definitely made compromises to survive, but I continue to be impressed by their longevity. For me at the moment, direct sales through my own website has proven to be a good substitute for independent record labels, but I would never have reached a sifficiently high profile to survive this way without the promotional efforts of labels like Hearts of Space.