missing scenes
who is this for?
Portland, Oregon’s Robert Hunter formed Missing Scenes in late 2021 as a response to the Moon. It’s a simple, primitive story. Hunter looked up at the Moon one night while on a walk with his daughter and decided, in a moment, that he would create one piece of music between each full moon over the ensuing year. And so a triptych of recordings followed, each of the three created during and dedicated to that particular moon cycle.
Despite it’s ubiquity, it’s constancy, the Moon continues to deeply compel us. The brightest thing in our night sky, yet it generates no light itself; it is more subtle than the sun, associated with fertility, mood, and spirit, with the tides. It is about shifts, not brute growth. It is of course a natural satellite but we associate it with mystery, introspection.
In fact after embarking on the yearlong project of creating this Moon triptych, Hunter became rather introspective, ruminating on why he followed the impulse to create at all. Or rather, for whom he was doing it. But as sure as the Moon orbits –– and compels us –– Hunter began work on a new set of pieces, as appropriate to the themes of waxing and waning, mystery, and distance, as anything he had made prior. Who Is This For? was written on a modular synth system that Hunter designed and assembled and through which he creates patient sonic spells, tones that stack and take slow motion strides through space, creating slower motion wakes of fuzz and fomentation. Fans of Coil’s seminal Time Machines or Hilary Woods’ Acts of Light will undoubtedly find something to love in Hunter’s masterful stirrings. These pieces rely on drones in the way the Moon itself spins on an axis. The drone is the center point. But as the Moon itself is contextualized by the utterly abyssal depths of space, the drone in each of this record’s pieces is surrounded by drifting fragments and textures which turn slowly, revealing, over and over, mysterious “other” sides.
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