ritchUAL, aka, ritchN (or, as it’s written on more official documents, Ritchard Napierkowski), has been a virtual fixture in the Austin music department for years, filling a variety of roles for a buncha different bands, sharing song-writing credits with tons of folks – A lot of the details, though not all, are worth the once-over, so check it out here.
He’s a prolific artist, with another collection of instrumentals coming in just a few more days (1/1/13, "iamanotheryou"). But let’s push the Pause button and enjoy the just-out "diodes&diatribes", which is described thusly:
17 collected works from 2003-2009 (i think)
some of these have “grown up” into songs for other bands i’ve worked with (like subNatural, carbon theory and panjoma to name a few) while others remained in the neutral zone of my hard drive for years.
These 17 tracks weight in at over an hour’s-worth of industrial-strength electronica, glitchy 8-bit aberrations, haunting ambient compositions, and pulsed through with delay-lined arpish electrocrunk, among other experimental efforts. For a collected work composed over 6+ years, these numbers bear the consistent stamp of a battle-hardened electronica composer worth listening to. Maybe to the artist this is just a loose collection of old songs, but we’re calling "diodes&diatribes" one of the better electronica releases of 2012.