Ragger’s Euphonic Sounds is a temporal anomaly tripping over itself and tumbling out your speakers. The LA-based duo, Jon Leland and Marc Riordan, create gleeful anachronisms, playing ragtime tunes with synthesizers and an electronic drum kit. A musical form timestamped to the turn of twentieth-century USA is delivered in plastic timbres and colours reminiscent of video game soundtracks from close to a century later. But Ragger are more than a curious retro-futurist homage. They don’t just replay old repertoire, they reanimate it.
An ancestor of jazz, ragtime’s name comes from ‘ragged time’, referencing the complex syncopation that makes the music so propulsive. It evolved from African-American traditions and communities, with pianist and composer Scott Joplin being perhaps its most influential proponent. His ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, published in 1899, was ragtime’s first hit, the sheet music selling 75,000 copies in its first six months. Although ‘Maple Leaf Rag isn’t on Euphonic Sounds, most of the record interprets Joplin compositions, apart from the final track ‘Wiggle Rags’, which is by George Botsford.
Joplin considered ragtime a serious branch of classical music. He composed operas and ballets in the style. Ragger pick up on that sophistication. Hearing ragtime standards played on synthesizers and digital drums rather than a piano is genuinely peculiar, but once you’re acclimatised, the hypnotic intricacy as much as the joy of ragtime shines through. Opener ‘Peacherine Rag’’s carnivalesque 16-bit bass meets shimmying melodic lines and drums that skip and shuffle. ‘Sunflower Slow Drag’ sees jovial chords dance atop a percussive bed of squelches, plops and trilling snare and hi-hat rolls.
It’s all undoubtedly close to a retro video game soundtrack. In the weird ahistorical apparition that is their music, Ragger gesture towards complex chronologies and flows of influence, for instance how game soundtracks have a deep history of taking inspiration from ragtime – an 8-bit version of Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ was the soundtrack to the 1983 arcade game Domino Man. Leland and Riordan don’t bring ragtime to the ballet, but they do amplify the music’s mazy elegance, illuminating how, beyond being a novelty from a bygone era, ragtime has endured like a meme that keeps re-emerging in unexpected places.
Ragtime was popular music, it was also adventurous, boundary pushing music. The Library of Congress entry on ragtime compares its impact to rock ‘n’ roll, heavy metal and jazz. Inspiring the curiosity of the young “at the same time it disquiets the staid and established.” Euphonic Sounds is a strange album, it’s a playful, intricately arranged record that contains some of the most bizarrely attention-grabbing music you’re likely to hear. Through their whimsical electronic interpretations, Ragger bring back some of ragtime’s ability to stun and disquiet.
