Robert Rich Echo of Small Things

After last year's fantastic live album – Calling Down The Sky, and his interesting but rather under whelming solo piano album - Open Window, this is one of his very best albums. Never as prolific as Steve Roach, with whom he is often unfairly bracketed, Rich continues to plough an interesting musical course, seemingly little affected by ongoing musical trends and fads in EM. This can best be described as ambient, but such an over used (and horrible) term, hardly begins to do this man's music justice.

As for this one, well it is a musical collaboration with his friend David Agasi, a photographer and there are some beautiful photographs in an excellent booklet that accompanies the release. The nine tracks, based on and inspired by the photographs, all merge into one another and a review of each would be pointless. Listen to it with your headphones on, and you are transported to another world, and it all sounds quite fantastic. Particularly impressive are the back to back pieces Scent of Night Jasmine and Summer Thunder – the latter being a standout. As is often the case there are the usual array of weird and wonderful musical instruments, including Sculpture and small things, but what really stands out for me is his lap steel guitar work, which provides such a haunting and mesmerising sound. This isn't easy listening by any means, and there is nothing that passes for rhythmic, foot tapping EM, and it is, I think, noticeably darker in tone than his more recent studio work, but there is no better introduction to this man's work than this.