AEM076 Bing and Ruth

I once read an essay that con­jec­tured that the moments we feel most fully alive and present in the world are the moments in which we get clos­est to the impos­si­ble. For exam­ple, what if you turned around right now and Bill Mur­ray was in your bed­room, star­ing at you, eat­ing an apple? You would prob­a­bly remem­ber that moment for the rest of your life, and it would cer­tainly put a thrill into the rest of your day, if not your week or month. Think of all the con­ver­sa­tions you would have about it (“I have no idea how he got in! And then he just climbed out the win­dow, never said a word!”), whereas if you turned around and found the pile of dirty clothes you left there yes­ter­day, you wouldn’t even remem­ber that moment ten min­utes later. This idea has stuck with me since then (it’s not unlikely that I’ve man­gled or mis­un­der­stood it in some way, but if so then it is now my idea) and it res­onates with my expe­ri­ence of music as well as my expe­ri­ence of life. The music that always grips me in the most vis­ceral and imme­di­ate way is the music that sounds impos­si­ble, that gen­er­ates in me a feel­ing of joy­ful sur­prise. Some­times it hap­pens in straight-up pop music, if I hear a new three chord song that sounds so eter­nal and so unique I can’t believe it wasn’t already writ­ten decades ago, or an uncon­ven­tional yet lovely chord pro­gres­sion or melody. More often it only lasts for a moment, a rhyth­mic hitch in the cho­rus of a song or one bar of sub­lime and strange har­mony. These are the moments in pop songs I play back over and over again, but in other modes of com­po­si­tion, minus the famil­iar pop anchors, the feel­ing of being in won­der­fully unfa­mil­iar ter­ri­tory can last for far longer.

Bing and Ruth, the com­po­si­tional out­let for Brooklyn-based pianist David Moore, man­ages to reach and sus­tain this feel­ing of the impos­si­ble impres­sively well. His lovely, wind­ing pieces man­age to achieve some of the same hyp­notic and oth­er­worldly qual­i­ties as elec­tric and elec­tronic music despite the fact that they are built almost entirely out of acoustic tex­tures (my first, prob­a­bly sim­plis­tic, reac­tion to hear­ing Bing and Ruth was to think “acoustic Stars of the Lid”). The key to the oth­er­world­li­ness in Moore’s work is the com­bi­na­tion of dis­parate instru­ments to form sin­gu­lar, uni­fied sounds that seem entirely alien to the instru­ments we think we know so well. For exam­ple, there is a wash of sound in B-side “go on.” which sounds to me like clar­inet, cello and bowed cym­bals, but part of the beauty and the fun of the music is that it’s very hard to tell just by lis­ten­ing what is mak­ing the strange sounds that you are hearing.

Moore is also unafraid of allow­ing his music to unfold nat­u­rally and grad­u­ally, which accounts for the longer track times and the sense of lux­u­ri­ous pac­ing. Explor­ing for three min­utes the sound of two clar­inets slip­ping in and out of tune with one another with an aching slow­ness (as on the very start of “go on.”) is some­thing that takes a bit of com­po­si­tional brav­ery, but it more than pays off. As with much min­i­mal­ism (this is, in fact, one of the points of Cage’s often mocked “4’33″”, which causes the audi­ence to lis­ten not to silence but to the ambi­ent and human sound in the con­cert hall), the sim­plic­ity and clar­ity of the ideas causes the audi­ence to lis­ten with an intense focus sel­dom given to music that dances and cavorts for atten­tion. The sound of the accel­er­at­ing and decel­er­at­ing beats, gen­er­ated by the two tones as they drift apart and then back together, is a fas­ci­nat­ing and strange one, putting the focus not on the pitches of the two wood­winds but on the rhythms gen­er­ated by their into­na­tion dif­fer­ences (Beats are nat­ural sound inter­fer­ence gen­er­ated by two tones which are very close together but not quite in uni­son. They sound like a rhyth­mic swelling, almost like tremolo, the speed of which varies by how close the two tones are to one another). Around this locus, Moore grad­u­ally adds other instru­ments, cul­mi­nat­ing in the arrival of his piano, which plays a gen­tle, steady, three-chord pat­tern. Over this pat­tern there are frag­ments of lovely, melan­cholic piano melodies set against drones cre­ated by the inter­sec­tion of bowed cym­bals with bowed strings and ana­log synths with mel­low clar­inets, com­bin­ing pitches and tex­tures from dif­fer­ent instru­ments into one sound that is unrec­og­niz­able and inim­itable. The descrip­tion may sound labored but the music is any­thing but. The effect is stun­ning, and it’s only enhanced by the moments when you hear a human voice or a cello emerge with a clar­ity that’s haunt­ingly brief. The way the song melts back into a sin­gle note at the very end (this time cello over­tones and voice, I think) is a moment of del­i­cate and per­fect symmetry.

The A-side “Rails” drawn from the band’s forth­com­ing City Lake album, begins with some Reichian clap­ping, over­lap­ping dif­fer­ent claves like puz­zle pieces and then match­ing them with a piano fig­ure that neatly par­al­lels their rhythms. Like the much sparser piano fig­ure in “go on.”, this serves as an anchor for the rest of the song and a spring­board for over­lap­ping vocal, string and reed melodies, which sit just far enough back in the mix that you have to really focus to draw them out. They always seem to dance away from your ear, and just as soon as you catch on to one it dis­ap­pears and you find your­self sud­denly drawn to a dif­fer­ent melody. Noth­ing ever seems to repeat, and the song has a light­ness to it that would almost make it sound impro­vised if it weren’t so care­fully woven together. It really ought to be said that the musi­cians who give life to Moore’s pieces are immensely skill­ful and sub­tle (for those keep­ing score, or try­ing to dis­cern var­i­ous instru­ments, the lineup is as fol­lows: Becca Stevens, Voice; Jean Rohe, Voice; Jeremy Viner, Clar­inet; Patrick Breiner, Clar­inet; Greg Hef­fer­nan, Cello; Leigh Stu­art, Cello; Jeff Rat­ner, Acoustic Bass; Chris Berry, Per­cus­sion; Myk Freed­man, Lap Steel; and Mike Effen­berger, Ana­log Synth). Every­thing is in its right place, and all the sounds blend effort­lessly together. With­out such tightly, expertly con­trolled per­for­mances, the pieces could never reach their deeply tex­tured heights.

My favorite moment in “Rails,” one which gives the lis­tener a thrilling weight­less feel­ing, is right around 4:20, when the floor tom and bass that have been with us for min­utes sud­denly drop out and a thick, clus­tered chord, com­posed of nearly every instru­ment in the band, swells and swells as if to burst. It’s a fan­tas­ti­cally tense moment, and when the bass and drum come back in it’s with the same sub­tle part, under­stated as every­thing else in Moore’s music, yet in con­text, buoy­ing up that thick cloud of sound, it feels absolutely tri­umphant, like the biggest sound in the world.

Gabe Birn­baum

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