Ricky Eat Acid

Ricky Eat Acid Release New LP When They Align Just So, Memories Of Another Life Bleed Into My Own Via All DSPS

Photo Cred: Nick Hughes

Philadelphia-based experimental soon this moment would be electronic artist Ricky Eat Acid releases When gone, and I’d be somewhere They Align Just So, Memories Of Another Life else, doing something else, Bleed Into My Own. and soon enough I wouldn’t even remember it, though it Do you know that feeling you get when was undoubtedly happening hearing certain music for the first time - it’s sort and if I no longer rememof like nostalgia for something you can’t actually bered it, even though it remember, or didn’t actually happen. Lately, it’s happened, would it really been happening to me with the Ernest Hood have ever happened at all? I album Neighborhoods so strongly I almost feel worried that everything I myself ‘living a thousand different lives, to remembered before that completion, in the blink of an eye, and forgetting moment could be a lie, even them again like dead dreams brushed from tired though I could remember so eyes in the morning light’ to quote a long time much of it, there was no way favorite writer. I don’t really have a better way to to prove that it really actually describe it, but it comes up a lot in the blank happened, once it was gone. static void of other people’s lives on the internet. (Coincidentally, the first “R You’ll see it a lot in Youtube comments, on old Rated Movie” I’d watch, just flash videos, really anywhere you turn if you a couple years later, would be look under the proverbial logs in the online the director’s cut of Blade forest, beneath the leaves on the forest floor, Runner.) I decided to commit where the salamanders live. When I was a kid, I every detail of the moment to got the same sort of feeling when playing certain memory, to see if I could videogames - Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, ‘hold on’ to it, so to speak - I Secret of Mana, Majora’s Mask, and so on - it don’t think I thought I could was like the kind of “Wanderlust feeling” that’d move about freely through come from reading certain books, watching time like Billy Pilgrim, but I certain movies, but for somewhere that wasn’t was still curious what would real, and couldn’t actually be accessed, except happen if I managed to ‘capture’ it in my mind that the music of games like Final Fantasy 6, maybe in dreams I suppose. well enough to return to it, the way it smelled, Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, the feeling of the hot air in our non-air- Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, Banjo Kazooie, I’ve been very preoccupied, the last few conditioned house, the sweet taste of the Majora’s Mask, Mother III, (and so on) was years, with the idea of memory, and false watermelon and the feeling of the few little what first inspired me to begin learning about memories especially - how easy it is to convince black seeds well hidden enough that I’d bite music, music theory, and how to compose it, this someone they experienced something that never down on them still, accidentally. It wasn’t until a was perfect for me, and I happily overactually happened. Honestly, how easy it is to few weeks later, in the backseat of our car as we committed myself to the project, so much that convince ourselves we experienced things that drove across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, when when the game itself ended up cancelled, I never happened. I would practice, sometimes, as I remembered my goal again suddenly & began continued to work on the soundtrack anyway, a kid even, telling myself to “remember” pouring over each detail, trying to see if I could just for fun. Luckily, I was allowed to keep the something wrong - that is, I’d tell myself over & ‘force’ myself back into that moment. I work I’d done and use it for anything I wanted, over an innocuous lie was the truth, things like “I marveled at how much time had passed, but I as long as I scraped any trace of their IP from it ate three oranges for lunch today” when I’d was disappointed to find I still had no way to (in the titles, and so on - hence my intentional & really had a sandwich, just to see if, as time prove that my memories, even the watermelon caution vagueness in talking about any of it) passed, I’d remember the lie as the truth. I kept eating, were real - I could remember the taste, LISTEN & SHARE: Ricky Eat Acid - “world map” track in a notebook, where I’d record each to the smell, the feeling of the moment with I became very interested in how I could remind myself of what was objectively real. convincing verisimilitude, but there was still make a proper album from it all, and what it Then I lost the book, and I forgot both versions nothing tangible - I’d have to take my memory might be like, what it might mean and represent in time anyway - the lie & the truth - so that it at it’s word, essentially. I don’t remember much - etc. What stuck out to me as the most didn’t matter anyway ultimately. from my childhood (they say trauma will do interesting facet was the absolute overwhelming that) but I can still recall that moment in the nostalgia at the heart of projects like these, I still remember the first time I really, kitchen with the same certainty as I did then. whether it’s something seemingly observed and truly realized what time was - or how we capitalized on simply to sell a project, or out of perceive it & what it represents to us, anyway. I How does it relate to this record? Not personal, real love for the style & tropes (seeing don’t know how old I was, but I couldn’t be perfectly, that’s for sure - but isn’t that the point as Undertale & Stardew Valley were, famously, more than five years old. It was close to the of art? both labors of love from a single creator, I’d fourth of July & I was eating watermelon at the readily drop both into the latter category). It’s kitchen table, with the window open across from I began writing this record in 2015, when not just that we go back to these touchstones me letting a breeze blow through the hot room. I I had a tentative job lined up to compose the from our childhoods a lot (and a lot more after a had a little bowl to spit the seeds into, but I music for a new indie game that was being certain age, especially) but things that are even preferred to take a spoon & try to poke them out developed. The details aren’t important, nor vaguely reminiscent of them can still elicit the of each slice, one by one, before eating it, so that mine to share, but it was something very much same knee-jerk emotional response despite not I wouldn’t accidentally swallow one and let it in line with the retro JRPG/SNES sensibilities & having the actual memories attached to them, or grow inside me (as I’d been told, and still at least art styles of subsequent games like Undertale anything like that - like hearing a certain kind of half-believed). It occurred to me suddenly that and Stardew Valley, among others. Considering retro synth sound used in other music, or a LISTEN & SHARE certain composition style meant to evoke music from those games & composers. Even with my Ricky Eat Acid - When They Align Just So, Memories Of Another Life Bleed Into My Own own music as Ricky Eat Acid - which, to be fair, https://youtu.be/ is frequently inspired in various ways by these BYl1UTeXGOw?list=OLAK5uy_m8LeBkRTFgg44cTxnuRD31CC7b2Wm6bbw things, notably in songs like “Inside my house, someplace I keep dreaming about” which I LISTEN & SHARE: Ricky Eat Acid - “smoking a cigarette or is it weed” wrote to mimic the opening song that plays https://youtu.be/g-nmWy26Alk when starting a new game in Chrono Trigger not the composition/style itself but the LISTEN & SHARE: Ricky Eat Acid - “waking up at home after the storm (something very emotional undercurrent of it - how I felt when beautiful)” listening to this song, with or without the actual https://youtu.be/BrDmD85zr3M memories of the game, so to speak. (Coincidentally, this is by far the most popular song I’ve https://youtu.be/jB5UuK7YLkE continued on next page December 2020 • Rock and Blues International 61

Ricky Eat Acid

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released, to date.) cruel. Thank you for listening to this record; it So, could an album written specifically in happy to finally share it with you after five long conversation with all of these influences and years of writing, re-writing, shuffling & composers evoke the same sort of emotions reshuffling it. I want to thank my wife, Kitty, for from a listener personally familiar with them, helping me shape it into the album it became despite not having any of the same memories and for helping me find the confidence to finish attached to the music? Obviously it would be a it and release it - as well as for agreeing to slightly different thing altogether, but in a release it through her label, Pretty Wavvy. I broader sense it gets back to the question of know I’m not an easy artist for a label to work memory, and of the ease with which false with sometimes (though it’s only because I care memories can slide in alongside (or in place of) a great, great deal about the work I do, even our own experiences, sometimes as easily as by when it would benefit me to dial it back and let an offhand suggestion subsumed into the brain’s go some - hah!) so I have to say thank you pulpy, static ooze. Could an album designed this double for that. I want to thank my other friends way also stand alone as a musical project who heard it along the way & helped me to form completely separate from its concept, to anyone it into the complete, final version you can hear without any knowledge of its influences or now. I want to thank Jesse Cannon for mastering conception - not to mention someone com- it and allowing it to sound as good as it does; I pletely oblivious to any of these games and the can’t even begin to explain how amazing it felt music that accompanies them, for any reason? to hear after four & half years spent listening to The goal, of course, is that it will; I wouldn’t the original quiet, tape-hiss & static coated draft. want to release something that required any kind of prerequisite knowledge. At the end of the day, Ricky Eat Acid is a solo electronic/ I just wanted to make a good record that I loved experimental music project started by Sam Ray a great deal, personally, and everything else sometime around 2009 or so, in Baltimore could be additional to that. Hopefully you enjoy Maryland. He currently resides in Philadelphia, it for what it is, either way, I don’t have any and has been based all around the country - in answer for any of this myself but I think it’s Florida, Los Angeles, New York City, and important to give a bit of an explanation for the elsewhere, including many months - maybe project, and it’s existence, to anyone who cares years - spent nomadically making music & & is interested. I know that it’s more pretentious living mostly out of hotels & on friendly floors. than ever, in this day & age, to talk so much For 4 - going on 5 - years he’s been married to about one’s art, but I also don’t really mind or fellow musician & producer/performer Kitty, care - I’ve always loved reading the author’s whose project is eponymous though equally preface to certain books when it’s written with varied in sound & style, and they have several particular care, in a way that influences the collaborative projects, including the rave-pop/ reading and gives greater clarity and context to future-pop/hyper-pop/EDM etc duo & concepit (Slapstick, by Kurt Vonnegut, is a particular tual/performantive art project The Pom-Poms, favorite example of this, and there’s a reason my and Ray’s long-term experimental pop/rock/ wife & I share matching tattoos of the campaign metal/whatever band/project Teen Suicide (also slogan logo from it). named - at various points - American Pleasure There is a lot more I want to say, but Knife, and many, many other things). you’ve suffered this far, and I thank you for it; means a great deal to me, and I am incredibly Club, Julia Brown, Starry Cat, Dumpster, God’s to go on beyond this point would be simply True to his reputation for experimenta62 Rock and Blues International • December 2020

tion, innovation, and prolificacy Ricky Eat Acid releases have encompassed many, many different styles over the past decade, from purely ethereal, beautiful ambient music, much more challenging drone, noise, and experimental sounds, hip hop & dance - of many eras & styles, trendy & nostalgic alike - and pop in its many, many fractured forms. Having long-held the project’s truest and most consistent ambition to be that of a pop-act, he likens the many Medusa-head-like tendrils of the form to something akin to the glow of a lighthouse, or nocturnal attraction of moths - best summed up in the singular & succinct press release for his to-date most popular & enduring album, Three Love Songs, as ‘lately i’ve been really into music that sounds like it’s reaching upwards to God and falling short, over & over’

A favorite of edgy, idiosyncratic, and genre-bending producers, rappers, singers, and Icons like Jaden Smith, Kevin Abstract, Iggy Pop, Jamie XX and even beloved handsome actor Cillian Murphy, all of whom have either sampled, collaborated with, or performed/DJ’ed his music - his biggest mainstream break to date has come from his frequent collaboration & artistic+intellectual synergy with Jaden Smith, who’s spoken frequently about Ray’s influence as an inspiration for his debut record ‘Syre’, of which Ray produced the title track - but though the sudden onslaught of real-world, real-life attention & interest would most likely prove intoxicating and tempting to another artist, he’s chosen to follow it all up with one of his most intriguingly strange releases yet - wow! It’s great.

Photo Credit: Sam Ray

WHEN THEY ALIGN JUST SO, MEMORIES OF ANOTHER LIFE BLEED INTO MY OWN - TRACKLISTING 1. underground cavern with light coming from high above 2. main theme (opening credits & title screen) 3. waking up at home after the storm (something very beautiful) 4. world map 5. inside someone’s house 6. nearby town at sunset 7. snowy mountain road 8. desolate ice cavern (something very cold) 9. dark & gloomy dungeon 10. ordinary battle theme 11. bicycle theme (cool sky blue) 12. wildflower meadow (woods theme) 13. suddenly it’s starting to rain 14. listening to his radio in the park 15. smoking a cigarette or is it weed 16. inside someone else’s house 17. creepy dinosaur world 18. in the graveyard & haunted house (with ghosts) 19. deep underground in the crystal caves 20. pirate ship theme 21. inside a totally different person’s house 22. the air filled with cherry blossoms or some other sort of flower petal 23. great big ravine 24. boss battle & dungeon clear 25. airship theme 26. true ending (something vaguely sad)