Few sonic artifacts emerge from cross-disciplinary intersections with the clarity and force of Strategic Structures, a collaboration between Kat Epple, Bob Stohl, and Robert Rauschenberg. Originally released in 1989 and newly rescued for reissue, this recording documents a live, site-specific event where sound, sculpture, and space converge in inventive symbiosis. Rauschenberg, the seminal postwar artist celebrated for hybridizing art’s material vocabulary, provided a set of “musical metal sculptures”—the titular strategic structures—whose shapes and resonances serve as both sculptures and instruments.

Epple and Stohl, partners in musical adventure as the duo Emerald Web, approached these gleaming objects with a palette of electronic timbres and spontaneous composition, improvising in real time to unite organic and machinic voices. What unfolds is a twenty-nine-minute suite that feels alternately liturgical and otherworldly; metallic strikes and sustained drones flirt with spectral electronic textures, conjuring moods that range from foreboding to angelic. The live aspect is paramount: each sound is inseparable from the contours of the environment, every gesture a negotiation between performer, object, and space.

The restrained drama of Strategic Structures is echoed in its very architecture - neither ambient detachment nor free improvisation, but a profound balancing act between resonance and silence, presence and absence. Rauschenberg’s involvement is not mere celebrity; his careful approach to sonic sculpture transforms the performance into an experiential dialogue, infusing the piece with both modernist rigor and elemental playfulness. Epple and Stohl’s electronic interventions further animate the metallic landscape, rendering it dreamlike rather than industrial, always alert to the alchemy of momentary interaction.

In retrospect, Strategic Structures remains a singular achievement: an unlikely convergence of late 20th-century sculpture, new age electronics, and spontaneous creation that invites listeners into the flux of materials and memory. It is an album that asks how art and sound might cohabit not only in theory, but in lived experience—a rare testament to invention where movement and meaning inhabit the same resonant space.