Last week, the daffodils bloomed. The grape hyacinths and crocuses, too. We didn’t plant the daffodils. They weren’t here when we bought the place, either. But there they are, in our border like we planned it that way. The flowers worked it out on their own. Lately, as I’ve lost more and more faith in people (a total bummer), I’ve found myself wanting more and more to nurture non-human things. To create for them, in the green space allotted to my partner and I (and in keeping with rather arbitrary civic codes), an accommodating, simpatico garden environment, one that seems apart from the extractive, imposing mode of existence we humans have landed upon, so wildly out of sync with the needs of the un-human. You know, a spot where daffodils might move in.
Anyway, as this project has stretched into years, I’ve found myself preoccupied with the potential sounds of natural systems working in harmony. Which is to say, I’ve been wondering what, in its totality, a symphony of the ‘natural’ world might sound like – or be translated into. All of it: from micro to macro, from weird amoeba to photosynthesis to aquatic behemoths to weather systems and slowly shifting earth. I suppose in all likelihood it would be a positively Herzog-ian din, but I am (against all odds) a hopeless romantic, so I’d like to think it’d sound something like Gryphon Rue’s latest long-player, I Keep My Diamond Necklace In A Pond Of Sparkling Water.
Comprised of six patient, ecological engagements and an odd, little coda, Rue’s new LP creaks and grumbles and hums with subterranean and oceanic immensity, singing in voices both animal and botanical. Rue allows long stretches of the album to pass without any, let’s say, overtly human instrumentation, relying instead on field recordings, circulatory system synthesis, instrumentation that could be heard as manipulated field recordings and/or circulatory system synthesis, and flutes that sound like new age weather. When strings do appear, they function as I hope my garden will, creating something of a fantasy or alternate history of the interaction between human beings and nature. These more ‘classically’ musical elements are considered, treading lightly on their surroundings, adding to the compositions but never at the expense of the sonic ecosystems they inhabit.
Kim Hiorthøy, when describing his latest LP Ghost Note, said it’s “a kind of emotional music that also hides in abstraction (or the other way around).” I Keep My Diamond Necklace In A Pond Of Sparkling Water shares this quality. It’s deeply moving without ever being easy or aiming for the middle. But where Hiorthøy’s record – itself interested in systems – is a marvelous, clattering exercise in intimacy, Rue’s never feels that way. Instead, it’s positively global. The whole world’s in there. The listener is an omnipresent visitor, zooming in and out at will, observing. Rue helpfully provides a breakdown of sound sources in the credits, but I think the record is best experienced not knowing exactly what’s what, letting imagination fill in the gaps.
Rue namechecks avant-garde elder statesman Alvin Curran as an influence on this body of work, on a newfound willingness to let ideas breathe, to allow them time. And yeah, that checks out for sure, but I’m more inclined to slot Rue alongside contemporary luminaries like, say, Lawrence English, Natalia Beyliss, M.Sage, Kate Carr, or Ultan O’Brien at his most abstract. More than that, with this one, I think Rue has earned a place amongst them. For 43:15, the spells cast by this eco-fantasia are nothing less than enthralling.
Which brings us to the final 2:19, that odd, little coda, so unlike everything that came before it in both aesthetic and attitude that it becomes, functionally, the opposite of all of it. ‘A Garden For Orpheus’ consists entirely of snippets of Alfred Frankenstein’s exasperated critique of the “agony of stairs” crowding the titular Klee. The track is, in and of itself, a very human imposition made of a human imposition about a human imposition featuring an overabundance of human impositions. Is this Rue the jokester? An anti-spell meant to dispel all spells previously cast? Some sort of rude wake-up call from the authorial front desk? I’m not sure I know what to make of it, but whatever – I kinda dig it. After all, our garden, despite its friendly intentions and noble ambitions, is also a human imposition and like it or not, I can’t be sat out there all day. Sometimes, I have to type nonsense into a computer for money. Sometimes, I just want to play video games.
