From the opening moments of “High Priestess,” the first track on Gryphon Rue’s stunning new album, 4n_Objx, there’s a sense of grandeur and impossibility. Layered drones and electronics coalesce into moments of spectral wonder, spread across shapeshifting soundscapes and complex rhythms. Rue blankets this music with countless textures, pulled from an array of source materials that add depth, making 4n_Objx feel alive. It’s expansive but still feels close, as though we’re watching the world bloom before us. Lines between the real and synthetic are blurred into a new, evocative space where the possibilities ahead are infinite. It’s an incredible ride.
4n_Objx is out now. Listen to it HERE. Find Gryphon Rue’s website HERE and follow him on Instagram HERE.
First, to start as always, what are some of your earliest memories with music and sound? Did you grow up with a lot of music around?
As a child, I stood in the grass listening to jets fly overhead. We lived on a quiet country road in Willow, NY and the jets created this low, beautiful hum. The long tones were mystifying. I suppose it’s a Doppler effect, but it was completely of my imagination. How could a distant object create a sound that I felt beneath my feet? And then it would taper and vanish.
I did not grow up in a musical household. I do remember my parents listening to UB40, Fine Young Cannibals, Frighty and Colonel Mite, Elvis Costello. My parents were photographers (we had a darkroom in our house, with its metallic smell and red light). They had Flockophobic Press, a letterpress publishing artist books. I remember playing with the lead type from the drawers.
Check Your Head by Beastie Boys was the first album to really communicate to me. It seemed like the music was being created by so many people, in many places. Our Jeep had a 3-band EQ and my mom tolerated me messing with Jimmy James and Pass the Mic. It took several years before I was making music. I could play the Flintstones theme on alto saxophone, but I gave it up because my teacher was a stoner who began requiring me to learn sheet music. My interest in music didn’t really spark until around age 12. My thing was sleight-of-hand magic.
When did you first start getting interested in writing your own songs? Were there any specific moments or a certain impetus that pushed you toward it?
For my 13th birthday, I was given a Stratocaster. I learned Smells Like Teen Spirit and a lot of Metallica. I spent all of my time in the basement recording onto Garageband. It was an outlet from school, from my parent’s breakup. I was an only child and I felt most comfortable with adults. The first song opened with the line, Short-haired girl with a wonderful ego, tripping at the feet of her mask. My stepfather Sam Hood had worked at Columbia Records in the ‘70s, he managed Max’s Kansas City, and prior to that The Gaslight Cafe. I was fascinated by his stories, I loved him, he encouraged me. He would play things like Loudon Wainwright III’s first album. He heard me listening to Beck’s One Foot in the Grave and kept it in his car for years.
How did your experiences at your grandfather’s warehouse, Club Vinyl, influence your musical style?
After my parent’s breakup when I was 8, I would visit my dad in the city. Vinyl was overwhelming, in a good way. People stared at me because I was so young, and the cigarette smoke, the extreme volume, the labyrinthine corridors. It was a dream. I remember a piece of plastic, it could’ve been a protractor, screwed to the master volume so the DJs couldn’t fuss with it.
I would listen to the transitions in the mixes, I’d rewind Paul Oakenfold’s Tranceport, trying to trace the moment a track overtook and grew from the previous one. It was an abstraction to me why a DJ mixed these short pieces together – it didn’t seem functional at the time but abstract. The first time I went to Vinyl I remember being in the booth during Shelter, which is Timmy Regisford’s party. Whatever he was playing, rare African stuff, it seemed like a deep incision in a collective body, is the best I can describe it. One ear. All moving together, with this intense pulse. I have sketchbooks of these guys doing their thing. I wanted to be a DJ, I wanted Danny Tenaglia to like me. One time Ariel Figueroa, the lighting man, gave me a lesson. He had a small keypad with presets and a button for flashing a white light. I saw him later play in coordination with Tenaglia and he hit that thing all the time. He explained that he played drums, and rhythm was everything. He even let me play his buttons with the warm-up DJ.
My grandfather was a beatnik, an eccentric who kept bunnies behind glass, and he told me they put turkeys on the dance floor for a Thanksgiving party. It was cringey but not to a kid. After his death when I was 10, my dad would take me. The OD’s and lawsuits – it was a burden for him. We started going in the day for business which wasn’t so fun. There was a hole in the bar that went down a tube to the basement, where wads of cash fell into a laundry bin. I would sit in his office bored to tears, making rubber band balls, or pushing the wads through a bill counter.
I love this phrasing in the description of your work – ‘the interweaving of the biological and the synthetic.’ Can you elaborate on what draws you to this fusion? How do you achieve this balance between acoustic and electronic elements in your compositions?
As a teenager, I had a plastic mohawk. A synthetic weave! Later the plastic was replaced with African porcupine quills. I find androgyny appealing, and I tend towards ambiguity in my work. Getting the balance right to achieve that organic/synthetic is a strange process. Generally, it’s a matter of layering contrasts, increasing variation. Striking the right balance is like lighting an object and throwing it into relief. Contrary to John Cage’s statement against relationships between sounds, disparity creates the living quality of the weave.
There is a relationship with ecology and a legacy I feel I’m a part of. There was a desire among certain musicians and artists of the ‘70s to interphase with nature. The composers of the Sonic Arts Union, for example. David Behrman’s records On the Other Ocean and Leapday Night, which crossed from computer music into contemporary ambient, maintain the primacy of tactility. There is a feedback circuit between a natural phenomenon and electronic music.
Interphasing is conceptually fundamental to my music. It’s also a question of finding the right patterns in diverse material. Take another example: Jackson Pollock achieved a level of order in his paintings, such that our brains do not identify his drip paintings as unnatural, they “look right,” even though there is basically something socially unacceptable about them. Theoretically, looking at a thicket would provoke a similar type of response. A certain degree of order/chaos looks convincing.
Okay, let’s talk about 4n_Objx a bit. I’ve been listening to it quite a bit, and I am drawn to the – I don’t know if ‘field recordings’ is the right description, but things like the recordings of your stomach or father. What inspires you to use such intimate sources in your music?
I was asked by Dutch filmmakers to compose music for a film. My concept was to transform the voices of those speaking in the documentary: artists Rosa Barba, Ernesto Neto, Zilvinas Kempinas, and my father Sandy Rower. The voices would form the basis of the music. It evolved into Operation for Preferred Embodiment, a track on the record. It’s a phrase used in registering a patent (the physical description of an invention). Even though it’s my dad’s voice, I imagine the supernatural movement of forests. While doing the transformations I would sometimes think about a piece by Paul DeMarinis, Fonetica Francese. Recording my stomach noises became the prompt to make Auscultation (the procedure of listening to the internal sounds of the body.) It was first titled Acids as a joke about the genres of acid-house, etc.
And how do feel like these personal elements contribute to the overall feel and message of your work?
The personal quality of those sources is not driving my interest. I had never recorded my stomach, it was behaving so loudly, with that curious expressive quality. I think the personal element is in the layers of sound, the crevices, the chromogenic.
You mention being fascinated with the mimetic potential of sounds. Can you discuss some examples from 4n_Objx where this fascination is most evident?
High Priestess climaxes with a kind of garden of sounds, chirps, and electronic blinks. Shibboleth has a beat where the highs modulate like the chanting of an ancient robot. Sometime last year I bought a Jupiter-6. The previous owner turned the resonance up to show me its “insect-like” sounds. There’s a bit of that on Alluvials, the ticklish psychoacoustic effect of the offset synths. At the conclusion of the album, Thresher has a sparky leaping described to me as a chorus of Russian men.
How do you see the relationship between sound and biological or molecular actions?
A biologist friend told me some insects are simple circuits going on-off, on-off. I did a piece that corresponds to a lightning bug. I hid a photocell like a cufflink on my sleeve, with wires going down the arm of my jacket. I was playing Bartok’s Sonata for Solo Violin adapted for the singing saw. When a flashlight shined on the photocell, a gate opened on a delay unit, adding echo and reverb to the saw. When the flashlight clicked off, you heard only the acoustic saw.
Certain sounds tap into sex. Consider a firing synapse, how it corresponds to zippy electronic repetitive noise. We can metaphorize with words borrowed from biology, which provide the illusion of explaining the appeal of certain sounds. It makes up for our inadequate vocabulary. The Shape of Time by George Kubler shows how Western art history adopts biological terms. We have the impression of a linear progression of stylistic developments. In fact, time has taken various shapes throughout history.
What challenges do you face in maintaining cohesion while working with such diverse elements?
Finishing a piece always takes longer than I would like. I admire artists who are satisfied capturing quick gestures, like one-shot painters. Working with diverse elements is the very basis of what I do, and I hardly feel much choice about it. It can be a nuisance when I lose the plot with so many things on the burner.
What role does dance or movement play in your composition process? And can you elaborate a little on the term ‘elastic dance’?
Elastic dance is about stretching the terms of dance music. Any kind of music feeding the activity in your mind could be dance. As Ornette puts it, “dancing in your head.” When electric current passes through the filament of a bulb, it gives off heat and light. Electricity dances. I would love to hear my music played in a club. I would also really like to work with a choreographer. My sweetheart dances like a demon in the video for Rake’s Progress.
John Ashbery’s poetry is cited as an influence. Can you talk a little about what aspects of his work resonate with you, and how do they translate into your musical compositions?
Beneath the surface texture, there are these undercurrents, subtle associations. His sentences are polysemic. This is also true of Paul Celan’s late poems. It makes me “paranoid” in a way because you never know how much of the meaning was grasped by Ashbery – I assume nothing got by him. You find emotional entanglements in his descriptions of nature. He also has a great ear. He listened to modern music while he wrote; Giacinto Scelsi, Elliott Carter, Gavin Bryars, John Cage. I titled a commission for Roulette Intermedium after his poem Clepsydra. Here’s a line: The reply wakens easily, darting from untruth to willed moment, scarcely called into being before it swells, the way a waterfall drums at different levels. And one from A Wave: Then the advantage of sinking in oneself, crashing through the skylight of one’s own received opinions redirects the maze, setting up significant erections of its own at chosen corners, like gibbets, and through the mesmerizing plan of the landscape becomes, at last, apparent.
What surprised you the most about making 4n_Objx?
It took me an especially long time to settle on a track sequence, and I was surprised that the overall shape of the record does not exactly “arc.” I tend to push things into “arcs” but this was like a puzzle. A friend described it as a “sound-design trance-spiral.”
Lastly, I like to close with this… what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The phasing of distant jets. Aquatic mixing of fluids in a drum. A foghorn in the distance. The nonsense in the string of sounds spoken by a cattle auctioneer. The harmonics in a robotic voice. The drawbar harmonics of a Hammond B3. The bass clarinets at the beginning of Music for 18 Musicians. The crack of a wooden baseball bat. My cat Licorice’s murmurs.
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