Dead Ryan is a Brooklyn-based producer, and he has just released his debut solo project. According to bandcamp, the album was “recorded over the past year in the early morning sunrise hours, after nights spent managing New York Music venue Le Poisson Rogue” (we can assume here that he meant le poisson rouge, else we have a sinister fish in our midst). The release is titled Always a Pallbearer, Never a Corpse, and it’s definitely worth a listen.
The surreal feeling from the album art by John Ruscher carries throughout the sonic bits. Imagine that Isao Tomita inhabited Brooklyn in 2016 and experiences a dissociative episode, had a nightcap of something — the resulting music would have sounded something like Dead Ryan’s.
Always a Pallbearer, Never a Corpse features eight tracks of experimental electronic music. Choices in sound are often bold and kitschy, but each synthesizer groove never overstays its welcome, reborn as the coming day. Notable in this release is the depth and doom of the synths, which can alternate in feels between futuristic funereal dirge and plucky video-game soundtrack. Something within the way the notes rub and brace against each other conjures remnants of the early morning hours within which this album was composed, and the bated heaviness of impending sleep.
You can stream the full album on Dead Ryan’s bandcamp.
