While the ingredients in any recent Brian Ruryk release are basically the same—rapid-fire editing, rubbery cassette-tape contortions, anxious Sonny-Sharrock-on-amphetamines acoustic guitar scribblings, torrents of debris (aural and actual) flying across the stereo field—somehow each release manages to be totally surprising and fresh. This new six-CD-R set is by no means an exception.
While ostensibly affiliated with noise, Ruryk’s uncharacteristically sharp and vivid approach to recording sets him apart from many of his peers. The generally dense, brash, and downright noisy aspects of his music are tempered by an intensely focused attention to sonic detail, which makes listening to his work—particularly Cycle Of Fords—an utterly enveloping sonic experience.
Much of the textural interest is achieved through reasonably simple means. Eschewing fancy processing, these recordings consist of highly edited and layered performances in various acoustic spaces and contexts. Any sonic manipulation appears to be relegated to editing, overdrive, and pause-and-rewind speed manipulation on cassette players. The juxtaposition of various sonic environments and different levels of audio fidelity are also key to his work’s manic dynamism. Similar, though, to the brazen aesthetics of Xenakis or Florian Hecker, Ruryk, despite being feverishly complex, never squanders the intended visceral impact by being overly cerebral about the details.
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.