Circle and Shadow — Volume One | Robert Scott Thompson

Circle and Shadow — Volume One

by Robert Scott Thompson

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Full Digital Discography

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Get all 202 Robert Scott Thompson releases available on Bandcamp and save 60%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of New Leucadians, Chime Wind, Shadowgraph, Lumen Oscura, Lake Isle of Innisfree, Sidewinder, imaginé pour entendre, empiler la résonance sur les résonances, Atmospherica, and 194 more. , and , .
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1.	Stillness in Motion 06:15	buy track
2.	Reflections in a Lotus Pond (Dragging the Sea With Dreams) 12:25	buy track
3.	Whispers of Eternity 05:33	buy track
4.	In Twilight Hue 03:19	buy track
5.	Lunar Radiance 09:52	buy track
6.	Ethereal Night's Calm 10:15	buy track
7.	Questions Unraveled in Stillness 02:40	buy track
8.	Serenade of the Night Sky 05:59	buy track

about

The relationship between an artist and their audience usually requires that both enter into an implicit agreement, one in which the artist promises to deliver a compelling journey, part dream, part memory, part uncharted territory; the audience, in turn, agrees to participate in this journey (as long as it has been delivered with planning, skill, and magic). The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that part of this agreement included what he called a “suspension of disbelief” on the part of the reader, listener, audience; this would mean that those who are reading or attending a play agree to check any critique of implausibility at the door and to allow themselves to be swept away by the journey as fully as possible.

This very phenomenon manifests when we are so engrossed in a film, television show, play, a novel, etc., that we no longer notice the proscenium arch, the television, the theater, the page, etc., and feel as though we have been transported into the work.

The two-volume work Circle and Shadow by Robert Scott Thompson takes the listener on several journeys, sometimes through superimposed landscapes that create a combined feeling of surprise and déjà vu. Many of these tracks seem hauntingly familiar (and, indeed, there are echoes of previous works interwoven here, recontextualized), yet the journey takes many wonderful twists and turns. As someone who is becoming familiar with Thompson’s works, I found myself drifting to “Reflection in a Lotus Pond” with a sense that I’ve been here before, but the scenery seems to have been evolving since last visited.

There is also a different palette of colors, textures, and voices on this project that makes it, I feel, unique among his works. Take “The Language of Dreams,” for example, a strange and wonderful soundscape opens the piece with what seem like someone else’s memories, voices through a wall, a sensation of being held between waking and that soft fade into an entirely different realm.

A track like “Serenade of Night Sky,” the piece that ends volume one, is the sort of piece that feels both intimate and vast in its emotional invitation to float, to ride the waves of sound rather than just listen. One gets the sense that it begins as an exclusive recital and spirals up and outward into a night sky. This is largely what Thompson’s work does; it invites the listener to experience and participate in these journeys, not on a surface level, but at every level, aloft overhead and down to “dragging the sea with dreams.”

— Eric Hill (June, 2023)

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released June 6, 2023

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Robert Scott Thompson Atlanta, Georgia

The term musical alchemist best describes modern music composer Robert Scott Thompson. Combining his mastery of the electroacoustic, contemporary instrumental, and avant-garde genres into a swirling cohesive whole, he is an important pioneer on music's new frontier.

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