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New York based dark ambient artist Robert Christopher just released his fourth full-length album entitled Mysterious Night. Robert Christopher created kind of a dark fantasy/horror, almost bizzare soundscapes captured in 11 tracks that could fit as a music score to surreal horror video games like Silent Hill or Resident Evil. The album was made with older analog gear and about 30% of it with electric guitar, which is why a new generation might think it fits in these modern games or why older fans might say John Carpenter or video games that are now 17 years old. The album can be purchased at Bandcamp and is available for streaming in the player below.
Robert Christopher commented exclusively for our webmagazine: "With music it’s all about passion. That is why musicians create and perform it, and why fans (even in the digital age) still buy music, tickets to shows, and merchandise. Passion is the glue that bonds us together even if the community a genre of music creates can get shattered into a million different sub-genres. It’s still there, in some way, shape, fashion or form. When a friend asked with my first release Inception (2013) why I was putting out music I pondered a good long moment then replied: “It’s in my blood.” It really wasn’t an epiphany, I just realized that I didn’t get bit by the bug again as some would say, but that no matter how dormant it was, the passion was still there, that I still had the fire burning in my belly. In February of 2014 I released Soporific and in November of that same year I released Aftermath. The first two albums I wrote and released with no theme or story at all. I firmly believed in not spoon-feeding the audience. And I also believed in the philosophy that I create the soundtrack the listener would supply the imagination. Just like readers of fiction everyone brings their own sensibilities and perspective to it and I didn’t want to pigeonhole or lock it in to just one interpretation, which then gives the music a chance to live many lives and the listener can create an endless amount of meaning or no meaning at all. It’s totally up to them. But I did slightly deviate from that with Aftermath. There was a pseudo-theme. I never got the question: “Aftermath of what?” If I did I would have said there wasn’t definitive event in mind. It starts with the aftermath then the listener decides if its a post-apocalyptic world right after the event or something else entirely. With my new album Mysterious Night released in October on Friday the thirteenth I deviated again, but only slightly. It didn’t start out the way it ended up. I wrote some pieces in 2015 but it never coalesced into an album. In 2016 I wrote some more but mostly I experimented with effects and synths and found what I did and didn’t like, which is all subjective. It was in the winter of 2017 that I had a bizarre dream, or more accurately a snapshot that stayed in my head when I woke up. Since it wasn’t one of those dreams that was a jumbled mess of scenes or one that ran linear like a movie in your mind there was no context. So the snapshot image didn’t have much meaning but there was inherent creepy vibe to it. I wrote it down on a sticky note and stuck it to my computer and the very next night I thought it might be a good beginning for a short story so I got a legal pad and a pencil and built upon that image in numerical fashion with short sentences. When I was finished I really liked it and that’s when the light bulb appeared over my head to not only write the story but score it as well. And thus the muse was born. The recording happened in three sessions in 2017. The first session was right after writing the outline sometime in early February. I found the effects I wanted to pair with the synth and wrote two pieces. Then, in the second session, which was done in the summer in mid-July I did some experimenting again with a different effect and found something I liked. This time I recorded electric guitar, which went really well. With the bulk finished, and with all the experimenting done, I did one more session in late September into early October and got a couple more tracks completed then. I waited a bit to let it sink in and was satisfied with what I had and it was just happenstance that I released it Friday the thirteenth. There was no guy named Jason wearing a hockey mask with a machete or teenaged camp counselors involved in this project." Link
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