“The Next Billion Years” (Foam and Sand Reworks) by Robot Koch is out now!
Robot Koch’s recent album, The Next Billion Years, is as musically as it is philosophically ambitious. Inspired by a mysterious recording, which the German producer serendipitously came across, of the 20th-century French explorer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the album imagines and gives sounds to a far distant future. It was this big-picture view that inspired Robot’s decision to work with the grandeur of an orchestra, and the famed Estonian conductor Kristjan Järvi, on the album, opening up his electronic meditations to the Baltic Sea Philharmonic’s terrain of acoustic instruments and arrangements for the first time.
Now, Robot decides to zoom in on his grandiose album project, giving its tracks a stripped-down Foam and Sand rework. Foam and Sand is Koch’s ambient soundscape and visual project, which runs parallel to the composer’s eponymous releases. Using mainly tape recordings, the signature Foam and Sand sound is created with loops that magnify their regularities and imperfections of the recordings and which are then shaped by the artist into hazy meditative journeys.
“One of the sonic hallmarks of Foam and Sand is that I embrace the unsteady beauty of tapes in the sound creation process,” says Koch. In reworking The Next Billion Years through these parameters, Koch not only embraced the imperfections of tape recordings but also allowed outtakes of the original album to find their space in the music. “The Next Billion Years” (Foam and Sand Reworks) is available now for download and streaming.
Listen here: https://robotkoch.lnk.to/TNBYFoamAndSand