Ben Rusch - music for people who love music

Some audio clips for you

The following takes place between 7am and 7.01am	The sound that fills the room when you close your eyes
Covering cold feet with warm sheets	Not angry, just disappointed. On second thoughts, angry.
The path continues and takes an unexpected turn	Contemplating the unthinkable
The End	Not pretty
More than you can understand	Is it true?
Walking slowly nowhere in particular	Yes, and this could be a lot faster if you just fly
The man who juggles jugs of water	Twisting endlessly like a double helix

Release notes

Recorded on 30 and 31 May 2010 in Belsize Park, London. All music written and performed by Ben Rusch. Master and publishing rights held by Ben Rusch. Cover artwork based on Shreyans Bhansali's lady in the water.

The album is a journey through a day and its events, as seen through the eyes of the girl standing in the rain. The songs are points on that journey - dots that you connect in your mind with whatever narrative, trajectory or squiggly line feels right to you. As this is a concept album with a narrative arc, the sound clips can't really do it justice but they give you a rough idea of the sound. Musically, it's extremely homogeneous by my standards, which is deliberate, and I had to resist a number of tantalising temptations, ditching several VERY experimental tracks at the last minute. In terms of style, there's no attempt at qualitative merit (which is just as well since previous experience indicates that the latter acts as a prohibitive deterrent). It's simply soundtrack music for an imaginary movie.

Recording the album

Even more so than the last instrumental album, this is an album designed to lose yourself in, and listen to it over and over again, so it was quite important to me, quite apart from the music being interesting, that from a sound engineering perspective, its dynamic range would be as high as humanly possible. By way of a two-word synopsis: it is.

If you've seen the notes on the "4" album, then you're already aware of my (selective) quest for dynamic range in audio engineering. This album is special in that regard since it's the first album where I set out to create an album with extreme dynamic range before I starting the recording sessions. The album is officially a DR14 album, and even more strikingly, this is the first album without any dynamic compression whatsoever. This means that every note on every instrument resonates exactly as it would naturally. What amazed me on the first listen is that the acoustic guitar melody part in Covering Cold Feet With Warm Sheets sounds so crisp that hearing it strike the few notes it does is an entirely different experience from the way it would sound in a dynamically compressed mix. So it was great fun to lean into every note knowing that the smallest subtleties in playing would come across.

The piano part was also a special experience. A good chunk of the piano parts I write, in terms of level of difficulty, is pitched well towards the upper limit of feasibility (for me), so I'm quite grateful when in a compressed mix, I can peel away a lesser layer of difficulty by not having to pay quite so much attention to the relative volume of each key stroke. On this album, however, the differences in volume of different key strokes are utterly exposed, which has the effect of (a) sorely reminding me of how rubbish my piano playing is, and (b) sounding quite pristine in those rare moments when I get the keys to balance exactly right.

So there. I hope you like it.

The story of what happened on the day when the girl in the blue dress decided to stand alone in the rain

an instrumental soundtrack to an imaginary movie

Release notes