RST - Warm Planes

Second full length offering from this talented Kiwi sound sculptor. Guaranteed to pin your head to the floor with calm, carefully abraded and composed blocks of unrelenting noise. Nothing here is accidental, every sound event has a purpose and the result is a festival of physically impacting soundworks in the now classic NZ style. Andrew Moon is RST, a solo sound exploration project he launched on the unsuspecting world via the lathe cut LP Event Horizon in 1994. This LP, like the nearly contemporaneous Surface of the Earth double LP, marked the real beginnings of something new in the NZ noise scene, until then pretty fully occupied by offshoots of the Dead C and their close relatives. Andrews past was as a drummer in various post punk NZ combos, but RST represented a considerable broadening of his sonic palette, using guitars, electronics and recording processes to weld slabs of sound into very slow moving and all-enveloping sonic environments. He subsequently featured on Hcorps genre defining compilation Le Jazz Non, banged out a few select lathe cut rarities and put out his first CD, R136a, on Thurston Moores Ecstatic Peace imprint. The key to RSTs development was a spell spent in London in the early 90s, getting to grips with non-linear music and improvised stratagems for sound making. Once sound was freed to be itself, there was no looking back for Mr Moon. He rapidly came to master the techniques of painting with sound, enabling himself to create sound worlds that hang suspended in the ear of the beholder, adrift from points of reference, where tones and isolated rhythm events turn slowly, casting light in interweaving circles around the inside of your brain. The pieces on this new album range from carefully wrought filigrees of sound sparkling in mid-air to slow moving bulldozers of low end noise that grind across the aural foreground, obliterating everything in their path. What links them together is the total dedication and attention to detail that accompanies their generation and recording, as with label compatriot K Group, no sound is just allowed to be there, every noise is sculpted and carefully placed for maximum aesthetic effect on the listener. Once more, confounding the armchair cynics who claim it is a dead cypher in a universe devoid of meaning, in RSTs hands the electric guitar is reclaimed and made to do new work, uplifting the spirit and splitting the mind open to reveal yet new interior universes of signification. RSTs Warm Planes are like thermal pools for the mind, from which the listener emerges revived and renewed. Dip in. - Corpus Hermeticum.