With his Arjunamusic label and a growing catalog of category-defying releases, Samuel Rohrercontinues to quietly, yet confidently, make a name for himself as a genuinely unique figure withinthe European electronic music realm. Over the past decade he has assembled a repertoire ofmusic that fills a sadly neglected gap in the modern musical landscape. That is to say, he hasmade a number of “electronically”-aided works that never seem to make “electronic-ism” the mainselling point or raison d'être. Rohrer understands that we inhabit a networked media landscapethat no longer sees a novelty value in every synthetic or technological sound, and by realizingthis, he makes a music that fully engages with the present without completely disregarding theexciting speculative sensibility that has allowed electronic music to solidify into a tradition. Hislatest solo album, Hungry Ghosts, again shows the high quality of sonic design that can beachieved by conceptualizing musical passages as living, breathing entities rather than assignposts to some still distant reality.Maybe more so than any of Rohrer’s solo records to date, Hungry Ghosts is the one thatmost unambiguously displays the artist as a kind of inspired sound “cultivator” or landscaperrather than just a straightforward “producer”. The emphasis here seems to be biological growthprocesses rendered in musical form, and in fact some track titles namechecking the biodiversityof the external world (“Slow Fox”, “Ctenophora”) and neurochemistry (“Serotonin”) lend someadditional credence to this interpretation.As with previous outings, Rohrer starts with his skills as a genre-resistant percussionistand builds from there, with dense clusters of drum hits and icy cymbal exclamations leading theway into a wide-open atmosphere full of fragmented phrases, marked with strange reversals orcompressions of time. The percussive portions and other ambiences merge together in such away that the latter seems like a kind of shifting, holographic camouflage for the former; an effectwhich makes for a greater than usual number of shifts in mood. Rohrer’s already establishedambiguity and mystery are the moods that permeate throughout, to be sure, but there are alsosurprising moments of humorous whimsy (the flourishes of cartoon mischief and teasing silenceson the tracks “Human Regression” and “Bodylanguage”), reverence (the optimistic organ swellsand steady sequencer guiding “Ceremonism”), and meditative focus (the slow-motion spectralwaltz of “Treehouse”). Also notable here are very brief etudes, such as “Window Pain,” whosedark, lush ebb and flow actually seem tailored to repeated or looped listening.It’s particularly remarkable that almost all of this material is recorded solo and in a “live /no overdubs” mode, given how much it feels like well-rehearsed ensemble playing, and given theimpeccable timing involved in continually exchanging the sounds at the very forefront of the mix.And here we come full circle to the idea of “electronic music” mentioned at the beginning here:instead of making us feel that we are in the presence of some fully-realized form brought backfrom “the future,” Rohrer invites us instead to witness fascinating processes of transition andmutation, and to value them for what they are now as much as for where they are headed.