Greetings!
Welcome to the online home of RICH ARITHMETIC (my real name: Rich Horton). You can find my music and videos and blog-musings here. Please feel free to browse.
Some background: I owned and operated the Optional Art record label in Seattle from 1988-2001, and my own mid-’90s album Seep In a Wigwam was included in man Best Indie Albums of 1995 lists, and Hartbeat Magazine (Berlin, Germany) included it in their Top 100 Best Power Pop Albums of All Time list.
Over the next several years after releasing Wigwam, my songs were featured on a number of indie-pop collections. But in 2001 I took a 20-year hiatus to raise a family and pay the mortgage. During that period I continued to play music on a small scale until I finally reappeared in 2021 with my first new full-length album in 26 years, Shiftingears, which writer and founder of the long-running International Pop Overthrow festivals, David Bash said showed that “Rich hasn’t lost a bit of his melodic, quirky charm,” and that John Borack writing in Goldmine Magazine called “an unexpected treat for fans of well-crafted, intelligent pop.”
Since then, I’ve released some 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.
You can find virtually all of this music in the links on this website. Enjoy!
In addition to songwriting and recording, I write both fiction and non-fiction, and worked for many years in the underground and fanzine press, where I 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.
