The glow by ruddaring & Un Ciego

The glow is a memory forest, a collection of poetry by stepph sharpe and its companion cassette by ruddaring & Un Ciego. Twelve poems unravel into an obsessive synthesis of eulogy and elegy for irretrievable experience. Flora/fauna are conjured only to disappear, compared to loved ones against the unattainable green of the jungle and woods — The sprawl of sorrow. What’s left is a feeling that beauty is irresistible, tragedy is relentless. The glow ends: an uncanny aphorism concludes that “here is just a place / that holds parts left after the whole / is gone.” Absence can be its own form of access.

Letting the form suggest itself, ruddaring & Un Ciego put the collection of poems to music : Glimmering twins. So the glow is not a monument built, but the traces left – audio, psychic, imaginal, spiritual – of the events that pass through us and we pass through. Un Ciego’s lysergic synth secrecy levels the electronic with the biological. His piano improvisations, laid down blindly without reference to previous takes, create discordant ropes of competing notes spread across the stereo field. Together these are the sedimentary rocks upon which ruddaring constructs a coral reef of sonic memory from an archive of field recordings dating back fifteen years. Her obsessive cut-up and post-processing collide with nebulous vocals and languid lapsteel, stringing a path through a perpetually shifting river of environments.

Guatemalan jungle gives way to Yosemite backcountry, coruscating synth fire resolves into tropical birdsong. The boxy fidelity of an hourly practice space is filled with digital crickets. Humming bees circle the microphone; pianos ascend to smoky-cloud. Night embers spit as loops dig a tunnel where the past pours in. Collage stranded on the receding tide of memory. Leaves blown and caught. Footprints filling with snow. There is strange comfort in leaving traces.

For fans of ketamine & Lynn Margulis.

she had / discovered / a short cut / into / the / forest

ruddaring lives along the russian river, northern CA. find bedroom writings and recordings here.

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