Chinese Poets and Surreal Sound: Robert Rich-The Complete Echoes Interview

Robert Rich is the 11th of 30 Icons of Echoes and has been a fixture on the show from the first day. He’s a polymath who is not only adept at many instruments but many other disciplines.  They include audio recording and mastering, wine making and dream theory. He writes poetry, seriously, and he creates beautifully abstract, often primal paintings that you can buy on his website. He’s an artist of questing intellectualism, which is what brought him to the poetry of Tu Fu from the Chinese Tang Dynasty. His Zen-like poems, translated by David Hinton, compelled Rich to create the sensual, ethereal moods of his album, Travelers’ Cloth. But there’s more than that, including Rich’s youthful hippie, techno-futurism, his current anti-humanism and rain drops falling on his head. We heard his shorter Echoes feature a few weeks ago. This is the complete interview.

Read John Diliberto’s CD of the Month review of Robert Rich’s Travelers’ Cloth

The Echoes Summer Fund Drive is On.