Echo of Small Things
music: Robert Rich
images: David Agasi


Our culture helps determine for us what we think is important and what we think is trivial, what is large and what is small. Yet meaning often waits at the periphery. Life happens in the gaps, in the soft-hued colors of the mundane, the accidental: a casual smile, the cycle of seasons, the view from a window, growing a garden, the smells and fabrics of home.

Often I value the everyday moments in life more than the grand statement. I try to reflect the beauty and depth of those small things that we stop seeing. I want to create experiences that heighten attention through rarification, to subtract until I can expose an essential truth.

David Agasi and I decided to collaborate after many years of friendship, and the title "Echo of Small Things" came from an effort to describe a common theme that unites us. David focuses his camera at a human scale: peripheral, with an almost accidental intimacy; myopic, exposing the quiet gaps between love and loneliness; warm, ripe with sensitivity and soft humor.

Robert Rich, Mountain View, CA USA
February 2005



On our daily merry-go-round, every turn can make the world look different than it did before. Relationships change or filter out with no warning, buildings are bulldozed as others rise in their place, seasonal clouds shift through the sky, and with them all definition of solid ground.

I find things by being lost. They come into my lens-net on lures I do not bait. The people and animals residing around us hold their own suggestive power; so do those objects considered dead or inanimate. By making photographs, amuck and without premeditation, I find meaning in the poetry of the everyday. I need no certainty of destination. I like to uncork secrets while sliding things softly off the frame, so you'll wonder where they've gone.

Robert's sounds can only be described as organic, regardless of source material. His understanding of the cyclical (italicized) and perpetual (italicized) in nature never ceases to astound. Listening to these tactile excavations, we can emerge with a resounding artifact: a gift of memory, or memory misplaced. By sharing our ideas and feelings, we rekindle our love of restless beauty, of what lies buried beyond the next sweet and perilous curve.

David Agasi, Tokyo, Japan
February 2005

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This CD from 2005 features 61 minutes of stately ambience. The music by Rich is inspired by a series of photographs by David Agasi.

Ethereal atmospherics become the medium for deeper tonalities and sweetly tingling textures. Phosphorescent instances sparkle throughout this music, like glimpses of a more tranquil dimension where everything radiates optimistic effervescence. These tiny epiphanies grow larger with each passing pulsation, filling the mind with burgeoning potential.

Elongated steel guitar notes slide and waft on the bubbling breeze. Fields of spectral flutes generate a hazy distance. Ponderous tones descend like heavy clouds, losing their grim demeanor by the time they surround the audience. Rainfall and sedate tubular bells engage in a sonic tryst.

Remaining gentle, this tuneage achieves an intensity of purity that releases the contemplative floodgates of the listener, opening the path to all kinds of opportunities.

Rich has a way of imbuing his minimal soundscapes with an organic quality that generates more than a subtle pipeline right into the listener’s soul. This tuneage flows like fragile air, but carries distinct sonic scents that convey vibrant emotion. Combined with Agasi’s pictures, the subtle atmospherics adopt distinct terminology.

This release is available in two editions: a deluxe signed-and-numbered version limited to 129 copies, and one where the pictures are printed in a conventional insert booklet.

Matt Howarth
Sonic Curiosity
www.soniccuriosity.com