Rapoon and Matt Howarth release ‘She Dances With Fred’
Rapoon’s Robin Storey and comic artist Matt Howarth release “She Dances With Fred,” an enhanced CD pairing a new Rapoon score with Howarth’s own story.
Ambient project Rapoon, the recording name of Robin Storey, has released ‘She Dances With Fred’, a collaboration with comic book and graphic novel creator Matt Howarth. Soleilmoon Recordings issues the release as an enhanced CD, limited to 300 copies, combining a new Rapoon score with a Howarth comic story included on the disc as a PDF file.
Howarth proposed the project after an earlier collaboration with the Legendary Pink Dots, whose Edward Ka-Spel suggested Soleilmoon Recordings to him. Browsing the label’s catalog, Howarth came across several Rapoon albums and pitched a similar project directly to Storey.
Storey wrote the music around frames and a story outline Howarth sent him. “I have long been interested in comic book art and when Matt contacted me about a collaboration I was immediately interested,” Storey said. “He sent me some frames and I was blown away by the artwork. I found that adding a musical score to the drawings and the story outline came very naturally as I identified very much with the character and the situation. It was at once humorous and enchanting.”
Howarth has built his career mixing music into comics since the 1970s, with guest appearances across his titles by musicians including The Residents, Hawkwind, Moby, Klaus Schulze, Yello, Wire and Steve Roach, and with Conrad Schnitzler, an original member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster, as a recurring presence in several of his graphic novels. For ‘She Dances With Fred,’ Howarth brought Storey a deep-space science-fiction scenario, a genre he has returned to throughout his work.
“She Dances With Fred” includes ten pieces: “Winternest,” “Learning an Inorganic Language,” “Improbable Dance Party,” “The Hoomun Concord,” “Treading Water in a Psychic Void,” “Meditation on Blue Ice,” “The Exit Door Might Be Sealed,” “Proactive Desperation” and “Thunder Plunder,” plus the accompanying comic PDF.
About Rapoon
Robin Storey began recording as Rapoon in 1992, after the breakup of Zoviet France, the Newcastle upon Tyne experimental group he had belonged to since 1980. He has said he started the project to explore ethnic and non-Western musical traditions and techniques that did not fit within Zoviet France. The name Rapoon came from his then two-year-old nephew’s mispronunciation of “Robin.”
Storey’s debut Rapoon release, “Dream Circle,” came out in 1992 on DOVentertainment. Through the 1990s he released steadily on Staalplaat and Soleilmoon, including “Raising Earthly Spirits” and “Vernal Crossing” in 1993, “Fallen Gods” in 1994, and the double-disc “The Kirghiz Light” in 1995. A 1996 US tour brought him into contact with Matt Jacobson of Relapse Records, leading to 1998’s “The Fires of the Borderlands” on Relapse’s Release Entertainment imprint, alongside “Tin of Drum” and “Just Say the Faith” the same year. Rapoon has also recorded collaborations with Randy Greif and Nigel Ayers as “Oedipus Brain Foil” (1998), with Ayers again as Hank & Slim on “The World Turned Gingham” (2000), with Victor Nubla on “About Breathing” (2002), and with Black Faction on “New Cult of the Sun Moon” (2002). Storey has continued releasing through Lens, Ewers Tonkunst, Soleilmoon and Aquarellist in the years since, with “She Dances With Fred” his latest release on Soleilmoon. Side-Line previously interviewed Storey about Rapoon in 2019.
Matt Howarth has worked as a comic book and graphic novel creator since co-founding Howski Studios in 1969. His first ongoing series, “Those Annoying Post Bros,” ran 63 issues across three publishers between 1985 and 1998, set in the fictional town of Bugtown. “Savage Henry,” which ran from 1987 to 1994, centers on a guitarist from an alternate reality who plays lead guitar in a fictional insect band called The Bulldaggers, and featured guest appearances throughout its run by real musicians. He later returned to the Bugtown setting with a six-issue 2000s MU Press series, which spawned prose novels beginning in 2008 and a roleplaying game designed by James Wallis. Howarth illustrated K.W. Jeter’s “Dr. Adder” and designed album art for Birdo’Pray; “The Last of the Neon Cynics” (2012), a science-fiction western set in the 23rd century, came with a soundtrack by Bill Nelson, and he created a comic to accompany Arthur Brown’s “The Magic Hat” CD the same year. “She Dances With Fred” pairs his comics with original music again, this time built around a new score by Rapoon.
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Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
