#rimarimba

RIMARIMBA [Robert COX]

"Below the Horizon"

(LP. Cordelia. 1985 / rec. 1983) [GB]

Rimarimba - Below the Horizon

Unlikely Records

Rimarimba - The Rimarimba Collection (Freedom To Spend reissues)

Freedom To Spend’s first catalog wide deep dive into an artist’s career focuses on four albums from Rimarimba, beginning with 1983’s Below The Horizon, followed by 1984’s On Dry Land, 1985’s In The Woods, and finally, the once-imagined, now-realized assembly of 1988’s Light Metabolism Number Prague.

Rimarimba was the project of Robert Cox, based in Felixstowe, on the seaside in Suffolk, UK. Rimarimba was not Cox’s first entry into the world of recorded music, but was the first time he explored, most perceptively, the parameters of a particular musical mode: one where minimalism is removed from its “high-art” mantle, Cox inveigling its practices in amongst the do-it-yourself creativity of a burgeoning and beguiling underground, letting the music breathe – and most importantly, letting it play, gifting it with imagination.

That sense of play is writ large across the four Rimarimba albums being circulated again, or in Light Metabolism Number Prague’s case, being made newly available. There’s an unaffected, warm-hearted joy to be heard in Cox’s music, hypnotic patterns unspooling from a Pandora’s-box of mass-produced and home built musical instruments, intertwining, tangling up in each other, and then riding out the road until they’ve said their piece, often parking somewhere surprisingly unfamiliar to where they started. Sometimes, it’s as though Cox is channelling preconscious phrases, tunes that exist in some kind of primordial soup of music, the storehouse of melody that we call upon in our most hallucinatory, incantatory moments.

RIMARIMBA [Robert COX]

"Chicago Death Excretion Geometry"

(cassette. Hamster rcds & tapes. 1987) [GB]

RIMARIMBA [Robert COX]

"Light Metabolism Number Prague"

(LP. Freedom To Spend. 2018 / rec. 1985-88) [GB]