Robert Rich - Rainforest (1989)

At an early age, Rich thought he disliked music. Around age 12, he began growing succulent plants as a hobby. He would leave a radio tuned to classical music for his plants. This experience influenced his interest in avant-garde and minimal composition.
In the 5th grade, he began studying viola and voice. He never completed his formal training because he became uncomfortable with reading musical notation. He began looking for ways to generate sounds similar to those he heard in his mind. He started improvising on his parents' piano to hear the sound of the sustained strings droning in tonal combinations, in the style of Charlemagne Palestine. He began building his own synthesizer in 1976 when he was 13 years old. In the years that followed, he adopted several musical influences ranging from John Cage and Terry Riley to Cluster and Klaus Schulze.
In 1979, he began working with a musician named Rick Davies, creating experimental music inspired by a wide range of avant-garde and art rock influences. This was the beginning of a long-term working relationship between these two artists.
In 1980, he bought a lap steel guitar from a pawn shop. With it, he began experimenting with alternate tunings and developed a fluid and almost vocal tone that he continues to use. Around that time, he had also learned to overcome the limitations of his synthesizer rig with spring reverb, tape delays and custom-made feedback systems that he created himself.
Rainforest (1989) is an album by the U.S. ambient musician Robert Rich. The inspiration for this album came when Rich traveled through the rainforests of the American Pacific Northwest. Seeing the lush beauty of that environment contrasted by the devastation caused by clear-cut logging filled the artist with a sense of urgency. A portion of the proceeds from this album goes to the Rainforest Action Network, a non-profit organization set up to protect the world's rainforests.
In this album, Rich continues to explore deeper into a rhythmic and organic style which began with Numena (1987). Several pieces carry a pronounced gamelan influence. The most experimental track on the album is a piece titled "The Raining Room", dedicated to the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rich_(musician)#Discography)