Gryphon Rue’s new LP creaks and grumbles and hums with subterranean and oceanic immensity, singing in voices both animal and botanical, says Bernie Brooks

Last week, the daffodils bloomed. The grape hyacinths and crocuses, too. We didn’t plant the daffodils. They weren’t here when we bought the place, either. But there they are, in our border like we planned it that way. The flowers worked it out on their own. Lately, as I’ve lost more and more faith in people (a total bummer), I’ve found myself wanting more and more to nurture non-human things. To create for them, in the green space allotted to my partner and I (and in keeping with rather arbitrary civic codes), an accommodating, simpatico garden environment, one that seems apart from the extractive, imposing mode of existence we humans have landed upon, so wildly out of sync with the needs of the un-human. You know, a spot where daffodils might move in.

Anyway, as this project has stretched into years, I’ve found myself preoccupied with the potential sounds of natural systems working in harmony. Which is to say, I’ve been wondering what, in its totality, a symphony of the ‘natural’ world might sound like – or be translated into. All of it: from micro to macro, from weird amoeba to photosynthesis to aquatic behemoths to weather systems and slowly shifting earth. I suppose in all likelihood it would be a positively Herzog-ian din, but I am (against all odds) a hopeless romantic, so I’d like to think it’d sound something like Gryphon Rue’s latest long-player, I Keep My Diamond Necklace In A Pond Of Sparkling Water.

Comprised of six patient, ecological engagements and an odd, little coda, Rue’s new LP creaks and grumbles and hums with subterranean and oceanic immensity, singing in voices both animal and botanical. Rue allows long stretches of the album to pass without any, let’s say, overtly human instrumentation, relying instead on field recordings, circulatory system synthesis, instrumentation that could be heard as manipulated field recordings and/or circulatory system synthesis, and flutes that sound like new age weather. When strings do appear, they function as I hope my garden will, creating something of a fantasy or alternate history of the interaction between human beings and nature. These more ‘classically’ musical elements are considered, treading lightly on their surroundings, adding to the compositions but never at the expense of the sonic ecosystems they inhabit.

Kim Hiorthøy, when describing his latest LP Ghost Note, said it’s “a kind of emotional music that also hides in abstraction (or the other way around).” I Keep My Diamond Necklace In A Pond Of Sparkling Water shares this quality. It’s deeply moving without ever being easy or aiming for the middle. But where Hiorthøy’s record – itself interested in systems – is a marvelous, clattering exercise in intimacy, Rue’s never feels that way. Instead, it’s positively global. The whole world’s in there. The listener is an omnipresent visitor, zooming in and out at will, observing. Rue helpfully provides a breakdown of sound sources in the credits, but I think the record is best experienced not knowing exactly what’s what, letting imagination fill in the gaps.

Rue namechecks avant-garde elder statesman Alvin Curran as an influence on this body of work, on a newfound willingness to let ideas breathe, to allow them time. And yeah, that checks out for sure, but I’m more inclined to slot Rue alongside contemporary luminaries like, say, Lawrence English, Natalia Beylis, M.Sage, Kate Carr, or Ultan O’Brien at his most abstract. More than that, with this one, I think Rue has earned a place amongst them. For 43:15, the spells cast by this eco-fantasia are nothing less than enthralling.

Which brings us to the final 2:19, that odd, little coda, so unlike everything that came before it in both aesthetic and attitude that it becomes, functionally, the opposite of all of it. ‘A Garden For Orpheus’ consists entirely of snippets of Alfred Frankenstein’s exasperated critique of the “agony of stairs” crowding the titular Klee. The track is, in and of itself, a very human imposition made of a human imposition about a human imposition featuring an overabundance of human impositions. Is this Rue the jokester? An anti-spell meant to dispel all spells previously cast? Some sort of rude wake-up call from the authorial front desk? I’m not sure I know what to make of it, but whatever – I kinda dig it. After all, our garden, despite its friendly intentions and noble ambitions, is also a human imposition and like it or not, I can’t be sat out there all day. Sometimes, I have to type nonsense into a computer for money. Sometimes, I just want to play video games.

A deadpan ode to selves mediated through tech surveillance (“The all-seeing eye and the second mind strike a strange alliance in a Google Portrait”) boasting groovily glitched visuals from video artist Benton C Bainbridge, Gryphon Rue’s debut single “Google Portrait” provided exactly what one might expect from a young, well connected Brooklyn artist and musician in 2016, but also something more. Heralding Rue’s ability to absorb everything around him and spit it out in slightly unexpected directions, two versions were eventually released, one an arch nod to Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson loft apartment funk, the other a woozy Lambchopesque drift, featuring Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500/Luna) on guitar and Deaf multidisciplinary artist Christine Sun Kim signing in the video.

Subsequent releases revealed more of Rue’s ear for the familiar and the defamiliarising. The bubbling tapestries of modular synth and Farfisa organ on his 2022 album A Spirit Appears To A Pair Of Lovers veered between the precision psychedelia of early 1970s Terry Riley and Philip Glass, and kosmische’s amniotic embrace, yet always chose less obvious melodic paths. 2024’s 4n_Objx exhibited even more restless energy, offering up bright, sweet packet sized servings of electroacoustic crispness, pulsing ambient techno, quirky field recordings, Cluster’s proto-industrial chug and the Arabic modes and analogue textures of Rabih Beaini.

I Keep My Diamond Necklace In A Pond Of Sparkling Water is never going to startle anyone with its elevator pitch – urban musician swaps the city for pastoral peace, adding frog sounds and gongs to his modular musings. In Rue’s case, his home and recording base was High Falls, a hamlet and sometime holiday resort upstate in the Catskill mountains. Yet in spite of a calmer, less grab-bag approach and definable anchoring in ambient territory, it would be inaccurate to impose upon I Keep My Diamond Necklace the narrative of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, where seclusion in woodsy nature strips away distraction to reveal new authentic ways of living. Having already produced parts of 4n_Objx there, Rue’s attention may have more audibly tuned into his surroundings but the creative sensibility of his previous releases remains intact.

One of several generations of artists, Rue is notably the great-grandson of Alexander Calder, celebrated for his sculptures that took the form of mobiles, whose suspended shapes danced abstract ballets. Rue’s own work encompasses not only albums, film soundtracks and collaborations including an improvising duo with Bainbridge, but curation, radio production and presentations, often on behalf of the foundation caring for Calder’s legacy. In the 2013 essay “Calder And Sound” he wrote about the overlooked sonic aspects of his great-grandfather’s creations, noting a preference for disparity over symmetry and an affinity with the aleatoric methods of mid-20th century composers such as John Cage and Earle Brown, who once commissioned Calder to create a mobile – Chef d’orchestre (1964) – whose movements would ‘conduct’ an ensemble.

Rue’s own aleatoric work could previously be heard on 2024’s Playing The Beetles, a piece in which live beetles moving around their habitat triggered samples of their calls to which musicians improvised. Here, “Jaeggy” displays similar unpredictability, with insect chirps, creaking sounds, Odetta Hartman’s plaintive violin and the agitated cries of birds recorded on an island off western Canada all coming

Diamond life: Gryphon Rue and going, underpinned by pulsating synth tones implying an unstated tension before its abrupt end.

Elsewhere, Rue writes that the seemingly random noises made as Calder’s mobiles clashed and clanged exist as part of a larger perception of time, where “patterns of sound/silence create compositions cobbled from memory snapshots, with beginnings and endings given arbitrary placements”. Such invitations for listeners to seize upon a moment and consider it from all sides extends throughout I Keep My Diamond Necklace and its array of vivid sound sources: as well as synth, guitar and bass there are bells, chimes, gongs and the innato, a ceramic flute whose three sculptural chambers create harmonious drones. On “Blue Eraser”, a smooth handful of clicking haematite magnets provide rhythmic counterpoint to Hartman’s elegantly spiralling violin; a pairing oddly reminiscent of Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s “Telephone And Rubber Band”. Meanwhile, chirping insects recorded in California and Polynesian humpback whales all join the fauna on Rue’s doorstep. Away from the brief reveries elicited by the album’s three or four minute tracks, “Jaeggy” and “An Octave Below Thunder” are longer, more meditative excursions. The latter, built upon the deep purrs of Mr Soul the cat, moves through strata of soft-edged yet distorted drones, blurring dream states with a poised, heightened awareness.

The album’s title comes from James Schuyler’s poem Fabergé in which human efforts at art are rendered redundant by nature’s beauty: “Here, just for you, is a rose made out of a real rose”. It closes with “A Garden For Orpheus”, in which a speech sample of critic Alfred Frankenstein objecting in 1949 to Paul Klee’s geometric drawing of the same title having “stairs within stairs… an agony of stairs” is layered into patterns that knowingly echo the rhythmic lines of Klee’s picture. Yet the inquisitive synth motifs whose repetitions start to evoke bird calls on “Squatter’s Quarters” suggest an approach more of humble curiosity. However abstract, it seems to say, an artist’s response can always find its own place in harmony with nature.