Oozetones / Fleshscapes by Cecyl Ruehlen

While this album was written and completed in early 2022 the work here reflects about a decade's worth of developing a unique approach to improvising, super-imposition, and sound engineering as a method of constantly shifting and expanding composition. In many ways this work is the logical conclusion of the desire for, and searching after, a certain sound and feeling, which I believe is present here....

...The ooze is all encompassing. The ooze moves across and through all things. The ooze is action and thought. The ooze is place and also the disintegration of place. The ooze is a dark river flowing from nowhere to nowhere. My good friend gave me this idea in a letter when I drifted to the desert. That is, that the creative mind is a dark river flowing from nowhere to nowhere. I painted the phrase on two mostly buried cinder blocks in the dirt pit at my rented house in a fractured lot surrounded by slothfully collapsing architecture. The script is faded now but I can see it as I rip away the stringy grass and shovel away the dirt that has blown over it from years of wind. This is an album that is as much about leaving a place as it is about being a body in a place. Not really a goodbye—More like an exasperated exhale...

... Artifacts of passing moments season the composition—phantom soundings—my kid eating a bowl of cereal, a dog barking, an orgasmic laugh, a distant cough. I didn’t place these things here, they just are. Sonic toilet flush. Dripping mouth. Ear worms.Pop signals. No back/fore-ground. Reflective doorways, crushing gates, flickering envelopes, walls of thought. Where is mind in all of the wash?

The ooze is animal and plant. The ooze is wash and clammer. The ooze is meat. The ooze of the body in heat. The ooze is space-time. The ooze is music. The ooze is everything that is not music. The ooze is death but not the end. Like a mushroom spore. An underground system. I play a note, or a scattering of notes. Something else is tangled and much more sophisticated below that note. Para-sonic. Terra-psychic. Horror and jubilation. A dark river flowing from nowhere to nowhere.
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This particular album encompasses many years of work and places traversed so thanks and gratitude to a lot of people, including:

Kari Treadwell Ruehlen, Sterling Ruehlen, my siblings Nyal Ruehlen, Sev Sorensen & Amelia Ruehlen, Diogenes Dreamer, Adán De La Garza, John Melillo, Chelsey Lee Trejo, Andrew Weathers, Joseph Braun, Mark Amerika, Prabjit Virdee, Jorge Boroquez, Angelica Lopez, Nika Kaiser, Steev Hise, CJ Boyd,Ryan Bruce, Brett Zamrzla(RIP), Alex Harbaugh, Jake Staab, Will Ptacek, Bryce True, Lauren Sarah Hayes, Gabby Isaac, Christian Ramirez, Tobias Fike, Scott Eichling & Frontera Aid Collective, The Golden Saguaro, Zack Licher-Katz, Craig Collier, Indigo Deany, Lori Emerson, Catherine Brooks, David Sherman, Igloo Martian, Subspace Collective, Exploded View, Bookmans Tucson, The Tank : Center For The Sonic Arts, Ryan Seward, High Desert Soundings, Ruben Olguin,Co-Incidence Festival, Carol Sorensen (Mom), Carlos Santistevan, Derek Monypeny, Kevin Larkin, Caldon Glover, Radio 1190AM Boulder/Denver, Marc Masters, Nicki Montgomery, Owen Davis, Rob Wallace, Alexander Bardorff, Jimmy Peggie, Liminal Collective Flagstaff, Les Roka, Jared Steffensen, Tomoko Sauvage, Claudia Woodman, John Barber, STTG Crew, Ephem-Aural Recordings, Ingrown Records, Never Anything Records, All Of The Wave Archive Artists, Pantano & Rillito River Washes, Madelyn House

Cecyl Ruehlen is an intermedia artist living in the desert southwestern US. He morphs iterative actions, collaborative projects, and varying recording processes into topological contortions with an array of chimeric instruments, abstract and extra-territorial sound forms / runs Harmonic Ooze Records / rep’d on 2182 kHz Recording Company

Booking : harmonicoozerecords@gmail.com

cecylruehlen.com