Back in the late Spring of 2001, I was still learning the wide array of intricacies in electronic music and becoming enamored with many of them. Simultaneously, I was beginning a long, slow, almost unnoticeable drift away from hip hop into a closer intimacy with various forms of electronica. I was perusing the aisles of vinyl at JAM, a now defunct Seattle area record store, and came across a sun-hazed double exposure of a cover. I took it up to the counter to get some headphones and lay open my ears to Pause by Four Tet. The lush acoustic and organic sounds left half of my brain on the floor and I had turned a corner in my relationship with electronic musical forms.
While Ben Runyan, better known as City Rain, cites Trentmoeller as his leading influence, his music actually evokes more kinship with Four Tet. Both artists are great to be mentioned around, but Four Tet’s mellow and melancholy offerings seemed to have crept further into the psyche of City Rain than the thumping and ominous fog of Trentmoeller. Like Hebden (Four Tet), Runyan deftly employs guitar and piano samples that come through as fresh as community-supported agriculture asparagus here in the Northwest. In fact, partly due to the name City Rain, this album feels, from beginning to end, like a Seattle album (even if my first 5 listens had Lawrence, Kansas as a backdrop). It has the emotional timbre of rain. Light Turned On even has its own little earthquakes (NO, not a Tori Amos/menstruation reference!) like Seattle. On “A Familiar Warmth” the echo slicing of guitar lends a tremulous feel to the song, as if the reverb and delay are playing tug of war with the sound spectrum in frugally measured tectonic shifts.
Much about Light Turned On seems to be about small(er) measurements. No song exceeds 5 and a quarter minutes in length, which I find succinct for an artist of this style of electronica. He isn’t messy and doesn’t drag out what he can say in a shorter sonic moment. The only time I was left wanting more was “Back On Track,” a simply beautiful song that first grabbed my deeper attention. There is this sucking/breathing sound, like a deep inhalation before relaxation. Then, in a nest of clement synths and folky guitar loops, it just wafts away on a lazy day’s wooden boat float. It soon lands in “Face For Books,” a title which made me snicker a little. “Face For Books” sounds to have a ghost buried in the machine with a heavily effected vocal, set low in the mix and with no intelligibility to the words I feel as though I should understand, but exist on the wrong plane to be able to comprehend.
Some other strengths that terrestrials can enjoy on this offering are, firstly, some similarities to Boards of Canada. In slower synth lines played in motifs of three from beginning to resolution, you can travel back to Music Has The Right To Children. Also, Runyan has certainly found his own melodic voice, which almost seems other dimensional at times and his drum programming has a strong mix of glitch and blip micro-programming with more organic, acoustic drum sounds. Oddly enough, the drum programming is not what I pay attention to primarily, which is a small detriment to the track. It may be due to the overall mix of levels. For the mood and hue of music described as having “a strong passion for emotive melodies”, I occasionally felt that the mix was slightly restrictive of the listener’s emotional response. For example, I felt very emotionally claustrophobic while listening to the opener, “12.”
All in all, this record will certainly continue to earn its keep in my rotation. It was an undeniably warm new companion on my recent solo road trip and has kept the variety of my GabePod selections fresh.
-Gabriel Bogart