If you’re looking for an album to showcase a mellow Monday morning, look no further than the new album from L.A Based composer Robot Koch. The new album The Next Billion Years is a set of remixes from Foam and Sand (Robot’s ambient side project) — and it takes the album down a new avenue, exploring a love of analogue synths and ambient electronica.
It’s a release that’s said to relay Robot’s own anxieties around climate change and human existence, as the artist states in the press release, “To save mankind from total disaster is a matter of a collective decision.”
When he’s not creating transcendent, ambient music for the soul, Koch spends his time writing soundtracks, as well as producing for major artists worldwide. He won several awards for his most recent live show, Sphere, and has picked up a number of composer awards over the years. Listening to the new album you can see why, as there’s an exquisite attention to detail throughout that shows an artist with a pure obsession for his craft.
Tracks such as “Glow” keep the musicality at the forefront, with organic piano sounds providing the driving elements of the track, while “Post String Theory” uses thick, analogue bass synths to drive the track forward. The album seems to ebb and flow between mixed emotions, beginning with an uplifting cadence on “Liquid” and “Stars as Eyes”, before slowly building towards a melancholic sadness on “Glow”.
Each piece is mixed to perfection, as premium audio engineering company and speaker manufacturer, L-Acoustics were involved in the mixing process throughout. Robot Koch has been known for his work within the electronic music space as well as soundtracks and production for other artists (see “Bones” by Finnegan Tui, a recent production from Robot’s studio). But with Foam and Sand, we see the artist explore his true passion, heartfelt ambient electronica with a depth of emotion rarely shown in his other guises.
It’s a project that feels much more personal to his approach and a process that comes more naturally, to the intensely talented artist. Speaking on the inspiration for the Foam and Sand project, he states that “Part of the problem we have today is that people feel separate from nature and each other. I think we need to perceive ourselves as part of nature, part of life, working as a single unified pattern, not separated, but integrated,”
