BING & RUTH
Share new single ‘Live Forever’
New album Species out Friday 17 July on 4AD / Rhythmethod
Today, Bing & Ruth release second single, ‘Live Forever’, from forthcoming new album, Species out Friday 17 July via 4AD / Remote Control. ‘Live Forever’ is a kind of sonic meditation. At 13 minutes, it is the longest composition on Species, but a series of three rising notes at the end of each phrase suggests something like a song form at work – albeit one that has been greatly stretched out.
Bing & Ruth’s ringleader, David Moore writes, “depending on how you’re registering time ‘Live Forever’ tends to be either the longest or shortest track on Species. It is a very peaceful song for me, and lately that seems to be what I’m most in need of. I hope you can find something in it for yourself.”
‘Live Forever’ is available today alongside visuals created by Derrick Belcham, who also directed the first Species single ‘I Had No Dream’. He says, “For Live Forever, I created a kind of light playground that David would have control over by placing a set of projectors in a large, empty, black room filled with haze, and creating a set of parameters that would change aspects of the light streaming from the projectors to cut three dimensional figures in the haze. These parameters were then tied to a control interface that David could use to “play” the song visually as he listened to playback on the album track. I placed a camera in the light environment to give a POV, and David performed takes of the visual accompaniment which were then inverted and color shifted to feed to a monitor in front of David and finally recorded live to the computer. The music video is an unaltered visual performance of the song with David at the controls of the system.”
Bing & Ruth is the ever-evolving project helmed by New York composer David Moore. While on a surface level, Species is an exploration of the sonic possibilities of the Farfisa organ, aided only by a clarinet and double bass (played respectively by founding members Jeremy Viner and Jeff Ratner), the title Species is a nod to both humanity and humility – a devotion to the godly intuition with which we are all endowed, and the humbleness required of us to perceive it. It’s also about suspended time and trance; not just a steady movement from A to B, but as something that flows, meanders and eddies, like water. “I suppose what interested me the most in putting this together was the concept of trance and what can happen to the listener by submitting to the wave of the thing,” Moore explains. “Upon reflection, I suppose what I was moving towards was a way to feel small – a way to feel deeply humble. I had always made music in search of some sort of inner peace, but I no longer cared so much to comfort myself. I’d grown tired, it seemed, of looking inward. I wanted to look nowhere.”
Species, and the transcendental state it embodies, was inspired by two recent loves of Moore’s: the desert and long-distance running. Briefly relocating from his New York base to Point Dume, between the Pacific Ocean and the desert, Moore was able to indulge in both passions, which in turn provided stimulus for new work. He says, “I’d found myself in places unfamiliar enough that I could easily lose all sense of direction, size and, more than anything, all sense of time. The music I was making became a kind of reflection of these intentional detachments – and a place to mirror that feeling of trance that had pushed them out in the first place.”
Bing & Ruth – ‘Live Forever’
Bing & Ruth – ‘Species’
1. Body In A Room
2. Badwater Psalm
3. I Had No Dream
4. Blood Harmony
5. Live Forever
6. The Pressure Of This Water
7. Nearer
