Gryphon Rue — Foliage of Caves

Gryphon Rue is a transdisciplinary composer, author, and curator with roots in Woodstock and Greenwich Village. The seven tracks that comprise Foliage of Caves, Rue’s debut album for Soap Library, trace a kaleidoscopic yet unassuming trip through electro-acoustic textures composed using a wholly unique instrument — the saw.

What is an instrument but a tool for a certain task? By modifying the task of the saw, we redefine its purpose, thereby entering a world of opposites: if the saw’s use is separation, here it is one of connecting disparate sounds. If the saw’s value is measured by its ability to make a finished product, here it is measured by its ability to guide the listener through open-ended compositions. If the saw’s aura is that of cold, metallic serrations, here it is warm and rounded.

These reversals aren’t just process-based parlor tricks, but describe a modern struggle of technological subversion at the hands of enterprising artists. Futurist John Naisbitt offers the term “high touch” to describe human subversion of techno-logic: “embracing technology that preserves our humanness and rejecting technology that intrudes upon it.” We are also forced to concede that “tech” is a continual process of our application and creative mis-use of commodified inventions. The saw is a physical instrument, immediate and pure. An ordinary tool, in Rue’s hands it produces almost electronic sounds. In service to the ordinary and the enigma which dwells within it, through the inducement of meditative states with gently fluctuating interference patterns, Foliage of Caves traces a zone of concentrated intricacy; offering a pleasurable antidote to the suspended abstraction that comes with increasing digitization. 

As a member of the light and sound duo Rue Bainbridge, the merging of Rue’s saw and electronics puts the ethos of “high touch” into practice. In Foliage of Caves, this strategy drives a great range of meticulously crafted and, at times, aleatoric sounds. 

Last summer Rue visited Luray Caverns in Virginia. As he puts it, “ancient calcium deposits hung like icicles at a fish market. I was mesmerized by pools of water reflecting stalactites, 200 feet underground in a mirror image, like standing inside crocodile jaws. The pools were crystal clear. Every so often, drips from the growing stalactites disturbed the water and shattered the illusion.” 

As digital-industrial products collect around us like a blinking snowbank, the animate warmth that imbues Foliage of Caves suggests that a solution to life’s problems isn’t promethean technological conquest, but a return to our fleshy bodies and faculties of attention, in which a happenstance ray of light across one’s face in the morning has the power to supersede the most rigorously conceived and executed device. Reflection is a renewable resource — which, in 2020, is exactly the kind of foresight we need.

Foliage of Caves releases on May 1, 2020 in physical and digital formats, accompanied by a Solar Grasshopper, reflecting a track title of the same name. One dollar of each sale will be donated to Parole Preparation Project.

“Now I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves.”

— Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat, 1871

“Last summer I visited Luray Caverns in Virginia. Ancient calcium deposits hung like icicles at a fish market. I was mesmerized by pools of water reflecting stalactites, 200 feet underground in a mirror image, like standing inside crocodile jaws. The pools were crystal clear. Every so often, drips from the growing stalactites disturbed the wa-ter and shattered the illusion. In the cavern there is also an organ. The inventor tested hundreds of stalactites and stalagmites, searching for a musical scale. When a ham-mer triggered by the organ taps on one of these cave icicles, it quietly chimes, sound-ing a hymn through the cavern.

Foliage of Caves features a lot of singing saw. The saw is a very physical instrument, immediate and pure. As an ordinary tool it produces almost electronic sounds. While recording ‘Golden Feelings’ I bowed the notes while matching sine tones in headphones. Everything completely blended. I had to stop playing and check that I was making sound!

Some people hear my saw playing as feedback, animal cries, voices. The other day at the airport someone asked me, ‘What’s in the case?’ So I told them, ‘It’s an acoustic theremin.’ Saws have a wonderful ambiguity. They are readymade instruments. How many instruments help you build a house?

An archer unsheathes an arrow and takes a breath. Drawing a line, bending the line into shape. Notes lock horns. Drawing the bow slow across the blade. An organ grin-der bent over her wheel. Overtones scrape from a fretless monochord. Shoot the breeze, William Tell.”

— Gryphon Rue