Textures & Tonalities for Analogue Synthesizers & Percussion
Rick Reger
Duration 48.26 | Released January 2025
Composed and Mixed by RICK REGER
Between April — August 2023
Instrument List:
Arp 2600 Synthesizer | VCS3 Synthesizer | Moog Voyager Synthesizer | Gongs |
Singing Bowls | Japanese Temple Bowl | Rainstick | Mellotron Mk. VI |
Mellotron M4000D | Roland C-30 Digital Celeste |
About the Artist
Rick Reger was born in Chicago in 1958 and has resided in the Chicago area most of his life. He began playing keyboards in 1971 and a few years later began sporadically studying composition independently. He creates music using percussion instruments and vintage keyboards and synthesizers, such as the Arp 2600, VCS3, Moog Voyager, Fender Rhodes and Mellotron. He has played in several local Chicago groups, and from 2012-2015, he was a member of The Margots, which included Ken Vandermark and Tim Daisy. The band made two records, Pescado and Sople′, on Okka Disk records. He has also worked periodically as a music journalist, and in the past his work appeared regularly in the Chicago Reader and Chicago Tribune newspapers.
Presspectives
Bill Meyer — Dusted Magazine — 20.06.2025
As truth in advertising goes, the title of this album is right up there with Raisin Bran. Read the name and you know exactly what the music’s key components are, but it takes a few more ingredients to hold it all together. Chicago-based synthesist Rick Reger’s binding elements are both compositional and instrumental, and while it is tempting to describe music like this in industrial terms, his end results feel rather biological. On “Metallic Harmony,” brief circuit-shaped melodies wiggle out of the canyons of ore-derived reverberation like tiny fish ducking in and out of a reef. And on “The Song of Night, Wind and Sand,” synthetic noise seems emerge from the rustle of rainsticks like plants emerging from soil. There’s plenty of space inside track’s sprawling dimensions; this is music that rewards the time one spends inhabiting it.
Nick Ostrum — Free Jazz Blog — 11.08.25
Rick Reger is an electronic musician and keyboardist from Chicago. His resume is relatively short, though it includes collaborations with Ken Vandermark and Tim Daisy. Over the last decade, he has released a lot of isolated tracks via his Bandcamp page. As far as I can tell, however, this is his first proper solo release, and certainly his first on Aural Terrains.
As with other releases on the label, the title is almost mechanically descriptive: Textures and Tonalities for Analogue Synthesizers and Percussion. Although accurate, that title implies something cold and sterile, some type of academic music for academics. Textures and Tonalities contains nothing of the sort. Instead, Reger deploys an array of vintage equipment (Arp 2600, VCS3, Moog Voyager, Fender Rhodes, Mellotron, Roland C-30 digital celeste) and percussion to create generally warm soundscapes. This is experimental. Think Kraftwerk’s abstract early work right after they took the plunge into cybernetics.
The soundscapes are characterized as much by space as they are by resonance. Metallic noises, shuttering coils, scraping shrapnel, and aerophonic pitches bounce back and forth. So too do acoustic elements: various singing bowls, a rain stick, an earthy rustling in the fourth track, and heavy gongs, especially on the first track. The latter is not quite on visceral level of Tatsuya Nakatani’s gong work, which one can literally feel throughout their body, but this is moving in that direction. Naturally, as much as this involves extended sonorities, so too does it feature sound decay. The dynamics involve density and textural changes rather than speed. Reger also does well playing with mood. He balances grandiosity (big, hollow rumbles) with fine, quiet details (the changing pitches of the otherwise dronal hum behind them). He adds Close Encounters keys implying, maybe, but otherwise stripped of the melody. Frequently this leads to disorientation and disconcertion, though many of the tones are also warming and comforting. One imagines this would sound incredible in a capacious cavern or gallery space, or just in some dark, dank, hole-in-the-wall club somewhere. It could turn the interior space into that of a tardis.
