Deluge Array by Cecyl Ruehlen

The title for this album came to me in 2018 and was intended to be a cacophonous media installation heavily impacted by layered percussive sounds. That never quite came to be. Instead, the phrase traveled with me for a few years and took on several conceptual iterations -- by January 2021 the title became the thought-form for these two compositions--which have also changed in form several times over, becoming completely new along the way. The album grew out from a collection of improvised alto saxophone recording sessions during February of 2021. In the summer of 2021, I began to really compose with these recordings, piecing them together, cutting them up, layering the parts in ways that, at first, seemed totally out-of-sync with the melodic quality of the recordings.

Monsoon hit that late summer in Tucson. It hit hard. The weeds grew waist high. I began to truly break down. Amidst a year and half of covid-19 social isolation, and being a father grappling with postpartum depression, and living away from many of my friends and family turned me inside out to say the least. I was a wreck. Shipwrecked. I was working feverishly on music but the compositions on this album went haywire, becoming something that didn't make sense. Frustrated and tired I shut them away. After September of '21 the tracks fell into disarray and then got buried in a few folders on a hard-drive where they sat until summer 2022 when I dug up the material anew after temporarily relocating to Flagstaff, Arizona.

The final version of this album is wildly different than where it all started. I began and completed the work in very different places and mental states. The second take on this album, which came together in Flagstaff was effortless, fun and brief--but intensely focused.

The imagery that Deluge Array summons is perplexing and yet the words flow off the english speaking tongue in a pleasant manner that seems at odds with the implications that the words themselves propose. While I am uncertain to what degree these recordings draw upon a vast and
interconnected collection of catastrophes, it was certainly the end of
something.

The entire process of making this album felt as one single effort and energy that fulfilled a way of composing that I had been grasping towards for many years. Improvisation, songwriting and engineering have all been modes of working in sound that I have shifted my attention between for the last 20 years.

In recent years, and more directly on this album, those separate roles have become a unified expression and when I say that Deluge Array uses
improvised material I mean that to be the case from the performed acoustic soundings and melodies to the post-production arrangement and shaping of the aural as a whole movement.

As with anyone whose been writing music for a long time I am indebted to and deeply influenced by so many people and places that have illuminated my desires and challenged me to do better. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish where I end and someone else begins. Music is always an act of throwing oneself into an infinite now, a future-present of imagining and being with sounds as they pass over and through us in flexible time.

Simultaneously though, music is an act of remembering something from before ourselves which allows the possibility of finding our place in the world through communing with another’s experiences. I don’t want to say anything else about this recording project, or state how it should be listened to, except to say that I have become more and more obsessed with trying to live inside of particular sounds, to burrow into them and then explode outwards from that inward spiral. Not just to hear or make a sound and then respond to it but also, and more intentionally, form the chamber in which the sound(s) eventually burst forth as.

Falt was a tape label (2016-->2024)

and is now a digital-only network.

https://ko-fi.com/falt

https://falt.substack.com/welcome