Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe - The Dead Past

With the temperature dropped down to around an even 0°C here in Scotland and with generally crisp, slightly cloudy skies, it definitely is getting that winter feel around here. It’s the type of weather that’s great for a vibrant, sobering walk that really makes your thoughts crystal clear — especially considering the massive amounts of turbulence going on in the world. It’s also the time of year I re-arrange my schedule to prioritize indoor-based activities I’ve been putting off for the majority of the year, and tend to listen to more music that augments the environment rather than creating one, and by that I mean more low-key, more “ambient” based music, especially when I need to think quite a bit.

It’s also when I tend to write more compositions in this style — nowadays under the Ostrofti moniker. As I’ve just released a new release under that name entitled Split Infinitives, I’m actually more in the headspace this time around to to write more Soft Riot tracks, contradicting what I’ve sort of said above. That’s of course another subject and not what this is about.

Today I’ve found myself listening to a track called “The Dead Past” by American composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, which encompasses all of these factors mentioned at the start of this piece. It’s a minimal, subtle and slightly rhythmic piece that gives me a feel of meditation but also one of uncertainty. A track from his 2017 album Two Orb Reel, it’s a somewhat representative piece of Lowe’s work within the past 5-10 years using complex modular synthesis as well as more avant-garde, physical sources of sound. This approach has been a feature on his more recent releases which include his more recent work moving into television soundtracks — such as Netflix‘s Telemarketers — and his soundtrack work on films such as the recent Candyman, A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, Master and more.

And with listening to this track I’ve reflected on the fact that I’ve been familiar with Lowe’s musical output over the past 20-25 years, starting first with the Chicago-based noise rock/post-punk outfit he played in called 90 Day Men, in which he filled in vocal and bass guitar duties. I never listened to them at the time although had definitely been familiar with their existence. I feel it’s something I probably should have been listening to back then, as their general sound was associated with bands like June Of 44 (another “track of the day”) and Rodan that I was listening in the mid to late 1990s. I suppose I was listening to different things when 90 Day Men came more into focus in the early 2000s, when I was listening to less of that type of music. I’ve since listened their output and with that have included a rather grainy, pixelated clip at the bottom of a live performance of theirs at Chicago’s legendary Empty Bottle venue from the year 2000.

Then, years later after having moved to the UK and the seeds for Soft Riot were starting to take place, I came across Lowe’s Project Lichens, which was a solo outing from Lowe mainly featuring layered voice meditations over sparse instrumentation, including guitar. As his 2007 album Ohms was released on a label I’d been following since the late 1990s — Kranky — it came into my orbit and I gave it a listen, bought it and it then became a regular “low key” listen for me, with a track from that album being included on a very early mix that’s on this site. It’s psychedelic and peaceful with a subtle wild weirdness that resonated with me.

Moving into the 2010s I got into his 2012 12″ EP Timon Irnok Manta — now using his full name of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe — which featured darker, more rhythmic and pulsating modular synth workouts, moving slightly further away from his Lichens work. Since then I’ve been keeping up with his releases over the years, especially as he moves into more festival performances along with his increasing involvement in panel talks at such conferences as Superbooth (clip from 2017 below). It’s a platform for which he’s well suited — being articulate, calming, patient and intelligent, he naturally fits the discussion format in an unarming way, making some of his complex works open to those in the audience.

While most of his most recent work is more modular synthesizer based, he still works with voice as was more about what his work with Lichens was focused on, as well as more physical sound sources, such as his work with Spell Casting (clip below), working with Harry Bertoia’s Sonambient metal sculptures.

Lowe’s most recent release, Recessed Draughting, which came out in June of this year goes more into the ambient/drone zone, which I’ve been enjoying as well.

As a final aside, I had something that might be somewhat close to a “celebrity spotting” of Lowe sometime in the mid-2010s here in the UK. For whatever reason I was on the top deck of a bus in Birmingham — I seem to remember the reason being a “replacement” service between two trains I was taking that went changed over in Birmingham. Going through the city centre on this bus I saw a figure that looked exactly like Lowe looking around curiously with what looked like a number of musical cases at another bus stop or taxi rank as my bus drove on past. My curiousity then took me to the internet to confirm my spotting. My passing through Birmingham at the time co-incided with the annual Supersonic Festival that happens there, at which Lowe was playing that year so my guess at my internal “spot the celebrity” game was correct.