Dave Ruder
February 29th, 2024
A little Leap Day update. Out today are two new songs from me & Jeff Tobias as Florida Lucid Dreaming. More songs to come from us in this formation!
Jeff & I & co are also working on getting the 2nd Thee Reps album out into the world, we’re in post-production now.
Outside of new recordings, it’s been slow. I had my fourth bout of Covid in January, which led to some big thingNY shows getting rescheduled to this August. My health is not so good, and at the moment I still can’t play guitar (it’s been almost four years) and no clarinet for me either. So I’m moving slowly and cautiously over here. There’s a couple vocal performance coming later this year I’m part of – Robert Ashley’s Foreign Experience at Roulette in May and Crash in Ireland in June. From there, we shall see.
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June 15th, 2023
Since I last updated this front page, Varispeed did Perfect Lives at the Big Ears Festival, which was awesome (maybe some documentation of that will show up sooner or later, I did The Bank & part of The Bar). There’s been a few instances of new work with thingNY (music by Joe White & Jay Afrisando) and Thee Reps. With Thee Reps, we’re a couple weeks from recording our long-awaited second album, so look for that out next year. thingNY will be doing some fun things in the Fall and some big things in January 2024. Can’t talk about it yet but look for more Robert Ashley stuff spring/summer 2024 too.
Meantime, I’ve been writing a lot. Writing songs. Having fun making music with Aliza Simons & Mae May & Jeff Tobias & others in some new and old formations. We’ll see where that music goes. There’s lots of great stuff happening in 2023 on Gold Bolus too for gosh shakes. I’ll acknowledge here on this website that experience and making art can be just great part of being alive, would recommend!
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October 30th, 2022
thingNY has just released our recording of Rick Burkhardt’s Passover! I’m very pleased to be sharing this amazing piece with the world. I’m on clarinet & voice. thingNY just played Lincoln Center last night and we hope to have some great stuff in 2023. Varispeed is cooking a few things, stay tuned for March 2023 things. Thee Reps are sitting on a ton of great new music and we’ll be hitting the recording studio before too long. And I’ve been writing some new stuff myself too. Busy music times for ol’ Dave.
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late January 2022
Got a new EP out as a chaser to November’s full length not Great. It’s called pilquetoast. Give it a listen!
Couple other things in the works! Varispeed are performing the latest version of The Blurring Test at Roulette in March. Thee Reps are working on a new album. thingNY will put out Passover at some point…
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September 2021
I’m very pleased to announce that my new album not Great is now available for preorder on Bandcamp. I started writing these songs in 2019, and I had hopes of recording them and a simple way in 2020. When the pandemic hit I switched to a model of having everyone record their parts at home and stitching them all together in post. After the first time I got COVID in March 2020, my own ability to play my main instruments (guitar & clarinet) began to decrease. I managed to record almost all of my parts for this album before the second time I got COVID (January 2021). I had to call in a little help to finish one guitar part. I’m extremely pleased to have so amazing players contributing on here as well. It sounds extra great from the mixing work of Stephe Cooper & the mastering work of MP Kuo.
For right now, you can hear the song “Pious Rious” over at Bandcamp. I’ll release another song next month, and then the whole thing will be available November. It’ll come out on tape and CD in addition to streaming and downloadable audio. Here’s the video for “Cosplay” form the album:
Otherwise, I’m still having a lot of post-COVID trouble with my hands and trying to get better at playing the keyboards and lap steel guitar, which don’t hurt so much. I’ve been writing a lot for a couple different outlets, and I have one performance coming up in October at Roulette. But this is a weird time, who knows where it goes from here?
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August 2020
If you’re new to Dave & his work, I put together a kind of sonic overview of what I do, which you can find here.
Obviously it’s hard to know what’s coming these days so hard to say what’s coming soon from me. All my past stuff on Bandcamp is free these days. Better to donate to a bail fund than spend $ on these recordings. Hopefully will have a new album of songs by Spring 2021. thingNY has been doing some online pieces since COVID hit, keep an eye out for more of those. Stay safe out there. Love, DR.
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December 20th, 2019
2019 is wrapping up. I got to do a lot more performing and writing this year than in recent years and I’m very grateful for that. Three albums I’m real proud of came out that I’m featured on – Thee Reps’s Minimal Surface, Varispeed’s Empty Words, and the new recording of Robert Ashley’s Improvement.
With an eye towards 2020, here’s what’s going on: Thee Reps have two shows in February and we’re gonna keep rolling out some new material. Varispeed is working with artist Peggy Weil on The Blurring Test, drawing on conversations from the chat bot MrMind which she ran for over a decade. The first public performance of this new materials is January 19th as part of the Exponential Festival, and look out for more to come in 2020. thingNY will be reanimating my piece from 2019 You Must Read a Lot of Jung and doing some other great stuff, fingers crossed including a remounting & album release of Rick Burkhardt’s Passover.
As for me, I started putting together a new album of songs in late summer, which I hope to finish writing by the end of the winter and record some time soon. After two very different trio arrangements of the new stuff, I’m going to keep trying out different ad hoc bands to play it (next one will have Cory Bracken on vibraphone). Stay tuned for much more on that front in 2020!
April 1st, 2019
Hey! Thee Reps album is here! You can listen to it and order the digital version right here:
If you’re more of a cassette tape person, you can order that here.
We’ve got three dates set for thingNY playing my new piece You Must Read a Lot of Jung. We’ll be in Hamden, CT on May 3rd, at Artefix in Queens on May 4th, and at Vox Populi in Philadelphia on May 5th.
And Varispeed’s working on something great a bit after that in mid-May, more on that sometime soon…
February 24th, 2019
Currently, I’m in the midst of a run of shows of Robert Ashley’s Improvement at the Kitchen. It’s going great. Some press here, here, or here. More over, there’s two new albums that are dear to my heart and here or almost here. Varispeed’s Empty Words is out now, and you can listen to that on Bandcamp or with this player:
And Thee Reps‘s album Minimal Surface is coming out on April 26th, co-released by Gold Bolus & Cassauna. Save the date 4/29/19, when there’s gonna be a release show at C’mon Everybody.
One other big date to save: May 4th, 2019 is gonna be the NYC premiere of my new piece for thingNY, You Must Read a Lot of Jung. It’s the biggest thing I’ve written in four years and I’m real proud of it. It’s quiet, crystal-like chamber music. Gonna be real beautiful. Save the date!
Also, NB, WordPress 5.0 is here and the site might look a little different than intended in a few places. Will get around to that shortly!
October 19th, 2018
I just made a new EP of covers! You can take a listen to five reinventions I spun this Fall in the collection known as Fixations 2. More on the recording front: I promise the release dates are approaching for Varispeed’s Empty Words and the debut from Thee Reps Minimal Surface. Both should be out in the next three months. Also keep an eye out for thingNY dates in December, playing some new music by Andrew Livingston, as well as Spring 2019 dates performing a new piece of mine called You Must Read a Lot of Jung. And you’ll definitely want to check out a new production of Robert Ashley’s Improvement I’m taking part in at the Kitchen in February. That’s what’s coming up!
June 15th, 2018
An update on what’s going on with me? thingNY just brought Rick Burkhardt’s Passover to four cities last month, you can expect more of that piece moving forward. I’m working on my first large scale piece for thingNY, having been a member for six or so years, keep your ears open for that. The Reps album we recorded last year is coming out this fall hurray hurray, and Varispeed’s releasing audio from our version of John Cage’s Empty Words in the fall as well. Coming right up, there’s a thingNY album release show on July 4th and Varispeed are doing a trio arrangement of Robert Ashley’s Love is a Good Example on July 20th at Issue Project Room. That’s the landscape right now!
February 5th, 2018
What’s on tap for Dave in the short-to-mid term, eh? 2018 is gonna see a number of revivals of Robert Ashley pieces I’ll be involved in, starting with his final piece Crash at Wesleyan University in early March. Varispeed will also trot out our version of “The Bank” from Perfect Lives that weekend. In the meantime, thingNY is gonna have an active spring, debuting new material from Rick Burkhardt and Gelsey Bell in NYC, Philly, and DC. Reps has a new website and has our first album recorded and coming out soon. Lots of interesting stuff coming out soon on Gold Bolus as well, and I’ll inevitably do a solo gig here and there. So that’s what you can expect out of me in the coming months!
September 7th, 2017
Qualms Rectified is here everybody! Well, official release date is 10/13. Release show will be 10/23 at Secret Project Robot in Bed-Stuy/Bushwick. Videos are below!
Thoughts below!
June 6th, 2017
I’m almost done with some new material. I started writing music back in January 2016 because I wanted to be in the midst of writing. I had no goals in mind. I wrote two small, quiet songs off the bat, both songs that were lyrically defensive. I had lots of other loose ends, ideas for different kinds of music kicking around. For one, I chewed on a progression of bass notes punctuated by putting your head underwater. It was a little tune I sang to myself while swimming laps. I wrote a song in April ’16 because I didn’t have a song handy to convey how angry I was at someone. It’s a song that works as a tool (specifically a lever). I wrote a decent country song, one with lots of chords that mimicked the chords from another (non-country) song I was bullish on. It was my third try writing a country song and this time it worked. I tried pushing through a song I’d had little ideas about for a while – this song was about how the song was a rip off of another song, and ascribed a certain conscious awareness of this fact to the song itself. After striking out in the method of writing via recording, I started notating this song and found something there for the first time.
In the midst of this, I wrote a couple new compositions for Reps, I band I’m 1/5 of that started back in early 2015. We had a nice bloom of new material in the second half of 2016 and I’m very excited about how we sound. Jeff, the bass player, has christened our work “Rock Instrument Music” – that is, music made on rock instruments, but not exactly rock music. There’s sheet music for most of it, it’s repetitive but sometimes complicated. I wouldn’t call it songs.
Around the same time I remounted a piece called The Gentleman Rests I wrote in late 2014/early 2015. I reorchestrated it a bit, and in the performance I conducted it, so I got inside the piece in that way you do when you’re responsible for nine players getting to the right spot together. To occupy my brain before shows each night, I would sing as many songs along with a guitar as I could remember. It was like getting ready for a test – not cramming, but preparing your brain. I never found cramming useful; either you already know it or you don’t. But get your brain feeling lithe and spry and you’ll be fine. Songs felt like the useful tool here, not pieces.
These focuses is not atypical in a year in my musical life (right now I’m also knee deep in Max/MSP for two upcoming installations). I’m looking at this pile of recorded material I’m assembling – the short, soft songs, the country song, the pool song, the rip off song, something that’s really more of a piece than a song (no words, no conventional song form). As I’m releasing it on my label, I’m putting on my label guy hat, and I’m thinking, christ, who’s gonna receive this record? It’s all over the place. Why can’t I just find a voice for 40 minutes of music?
I find two things: 1.) I’m pleased at my range 2.) It’s probably hard to find unless you’ve been around me a lot, but some threads are becoming apparent to me. There’s a kind of sprawling song-sort-of-thing, on the edge of being a song and being a piece, that’s becoming the clearest, most consistent form of expression I’ve got. Probably 5-9 min, probably not purely instrumental, but probably with only a sprinkling of words here and there. Repetitive in a particular way that feels functional, not idiomatic to, say, motoric minimalism or gamelan or sample-based music or anything else I’ve been involved with. But the repetitive part is pretty essential.
At age 34 I’m not now trying, nor have I at any time in the past 15 years, to focus on be exceptionally great at any one thing. But in spite of that it’s hard not to form an identity, in this case, a sonic imprint.
I’d liken it to when I was 20 and the way I looked changed a lot. In a short span, I cut off my long hair, grew & shaved numerous beards, had to stop wearing contact lenses, etc. One time I was in a dance studio wearing a green shirt I’d had for a while and some green sweat pants (I think maybe also tall green socks too) [I’m wearing this shirt & sweat pants today while convalescing from a hospital visit, it turns out]. I looked in the mirror, saw the green, and recognized it immediately. I didn’t recognize my own face, but the green was clearly me.
I figured out how to write a piece when I was 19, but it took me til age 25 to write a song. The idea of a piece worked more for my younger self – the rules are what you say they are. Form is what you want it to be. Most music I wrote before 25 didn’t really repeat much if at all. I went to grad school to write music when I was 26, and I produced a ton of material for the three years after that. Since then, it’s a slower flow, and what comes out is more likely to be repetitive and at least referencing some kind of known form. I think songs suit present-day me better. I also think about a personal forerunner like Bob Ashley, who called much of what he did “songs”, though that was unlikely to be the first word that came to other people’s minds about them. I like how gentle and friendly this designation is, what it opens up for pieces and songs alike. Songs in this context can last forever and include whatever music or non-music you like, but there’s gotta be a singer’s intention behind it of laying bare, of opening oneself.
Being in a position where as an artist you have to remake the world every single time you sit down is but one possibility. I still can do that, but I realize it’s one of several available modes. It was hard for me to accept at age 20 that drilling down deep and continually refining one thought, one idea, one style, was valid/cool/artistic. I was pretty cocky and emotionally detached.
I listen back to things I’ve done, and it feels like a historical thing mostly, but not an exercise in mirror looking. And then again there’s a kernel in some clips where the recognition is there. You stop what you’re doing and you marvel at finding yourself amidst all the creative silt, amongst all the hours of labor and compression of time past.
This album isn’t done yet, but already listening to it for mixing & such, it feels like me as I’m making it. So that’s a neat thing I wasn’t counting on.