Greetings!
RICH ARITHMETIC (real name: Richard Horton) is a songwriter & recording artist who owned and operated the Optional Art record label in Seattle from 1988-2001. His mid-’90s album Sleep In a Wigwam was included by many indie-pop critics in their Best Indie Albums of The Year lists, and Hartbeat Magazine (Berlin, Germany) included it as one of their choices in their Top 100 Best Power Pop Albums of All Time list.
After Wigwam, Rich disappeared from the indie-pop scene for more than 25 years as he raised a family, but then reappeared in 2021 with a brand-new album Shiftingears, which showed that “Rich hasn’t lost a bit of his melodic, quirky charm” (David Bash, International Pop Overthrow) and that John Borack writing in Goldmine Magazine called “an unexpected treat for fans of well-crafted, intelligent pop.”
Since then, Rich has released a couple of digital singles, several videos, and a subsequent full-length album Pushbutton Romance, which is another collection of eclectic pop-and-roll melodies, interweaving ba-ba-ba harmonies, and hooky guitar riffs.
In addition to his songwriting and recording, Rich Horton is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and worked for many years in the underground and fanzine press, where he often expressed a variety of interests beyond popular music and rock ‘n’ roll, including but not limited to literature, cinema & filmmaking, theology & religion, sports (primarily baseball), the art of comic books, and politics.
