Dave Ruder – bio

Dave Ruder (he/they) is a musician etc based in New York City. Dave has been known to wear the following hats: composer, vocalist, clarinetist, guitarist, electronicist, collaborator, songwriter, arranger, conceptualist, producer, label runner, curator, arts admin guy, you get the idea. Dave’s work has touched on other disciplines as well, especially opera and dance, and to some extent storytelling, theater, visual and performance art, conceptual art, etc. etc. these skills are all related and differences between disciplines are largely illusory etc. etc.

Some of the important flavors of Dave’s work are the very ephemeral, the very crude, the very articulate, the very subtle, the very repetitive, and the very stupid. Though Dave was trained in an experimental art tradition and that is at the heart of much of his technique, he makes more personal work these days. Much of his output is songs now, but he has loads of experience in writing more abstract and open music, text, conceptual pieces, etc.

In 2011, Dave co-founded Varispeed, a collective dedicated to durational, site-specific performances of avant-garde classics, most notably Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives. Since 2011, Dave has been involved with the experimental music collective thingNY, becoming a full member in 2012 and co-writing new material with the group, including This Takes Place Close By, subtracTTTTTTTTT, A Series of Landscapes, and Dear Nancine, as well as solely writing the sextet You Must Read a Lot of Jung (2018). Dave co-founded Thee Reps, a band that plays rock instrument music, in 2015.  Dave also performs his own songs, solo or with a couple friends.

Dave is well-known as a performer of the music of Robert Ashley. Dave premiered Ashley’s Crash and World War III: Just the Highlights, and has also performed Perfect Lives, Improvement, Trios (White on White), That Morning Thing, Love is a Good Example and Public Opinion Descends Upon the Demonstrators. Dave was fortunate to work with Ashley for several years and has written extensively on his work (and the press has written quite a bit about Dave doing these works as well).

Dave has also worked with the choreographer Abigail Levine on several projects, including 2017’s Restagings No. 1: Choreographing LeWitt, a 30-hour installation at the Fridman Gallery.  From 2012-2014, Dave worked with choreographer Kimberly Bartosik on you are my heat and glare. Dave also composed music for Joanna Kotze’s Bessie-award-winning it happened it had happened it is happening it will happen. Dave has worked with Panoply Performance Laboratory on numerous large scale projects such as Institute_Institut, Nature Fetish, and Embarrassed of the Whole.

Formerly, Dave & Aliza Simons performed songs as Why Lie?. Why Lie? released two albums, available on Gold Bolus Recordings. Dave was/is also half of Dave & Woody’s Chicken Slaughtering, LLC, which didn’t actually slaughter chickens but posited new ways of telling stories across media with deeply personal and often totally mundane material. Dave was a member of Sweat Lodge, a new music performing & presenting sextet, which also ran a monthly Performers Forum in Brooklyn. Dave played with Gamelan Kusuma Laras for three years. Dave was a core member of Eidolon (aka Ensemble One aka Large Ensemble), an improvising chamber group of sorts, from 2007-09. Between 2005 and 2008, Dave spent time playing in a noisy reed duo with Dave Kadden, called Trouble, and a guitar duo with Jack Reilly, called Young Vandals. Dave had the pleasure of playing clarinet, synth, and voice with ellen o for most of 2014 as well.

Dave also has large solo recording output, which is well documented on ten releases, eight of which are available on Gold Bolus Recordings. Dave got serious about using Gold Bolus Recordings as a venture for his & other folks’ music in 2013. But the ten albums/EPs show Dave’s evolution as a composer, performer, and musical thinker over the last 15 years.  Before running a label, Dave curated a performance series called Flowering Inconsistencies in Bushwick, Brooklyn, from 2009-11.  As a composer, Dave wrote The Gentleman Rests, a meditation on the certification of the 2000 presidential election, with a commission from the Jerome Foundation and Roulette in 2014-15. Dave is also pretty proud of a series of 100+ open scores called WHY LIE? (all caps) he wrote in 2010.

Though Dave has been a multi-instrumentalist since the mid-90s, in more recent years he has had to stop playing some central instruments due to long term health conditions (long Covid chief among them). He’s playing more synth these days and hasn’t been able to play guitar (and related instruments) consistently since 2020.

Dave studied music at Wesleyan University as an undergraduate and a few years later got a masters degree in composition from Brooklyn College. Dave worked at arts non-profits for most of 2005-2018 and now works for a different kind of non-profit in NYC.

If something you like to see in someone’s bio includes a list of places they’ve performed, I’ve done you one better and made a map.