FEATURE: Spotlight: Emma Ruth Rundle

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Emma Ruth Rundle

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I did recently say that…

PHOTO CREDIT: Emma Wondra

I was going to include male artists and bands but, as someone who has been listening to Emma Ruth Rundle a lot lately, I wanted to include her now. The focus is going to be around her previous studio album, Engine of Hell. One of the best albums of last year, I am introducing an artist that many people might be well aware of. This feature is not only designed to champion brand-new acts coming through. It is also an opportunity to spotlight those who are established but might not be known as widely as they deserve. Emma Ruth Rundle is a songwriter, guitarist and visual artist based in Portland, Oregon. Formerly of the Nocturnes and Marriages, she has released five solo albums and is a member of Red Sparowes. I am going to end with a review for Engine of Hell. There were quite a few interviews conducted around the release of a hugely prolific album. Her current album, EG2: Dowsing Voice, doesn’t have too many interviews attached, but it has been acclaimed. It is another remarkable work from one of the finest artists in the world. It is an album of improvised music that you need to check out. Even though her latest album is out there and is another remarkable work, I will keep a lot of the focus on Engine of Hell. Rundle is one of the most prolific artists out there - and surely one of the most original and talented.

I am going to dip into some interviews that were conducted around the release of the marvelous Engine of Hell. Go and get a vinyl copy of the album if you can, as it is perfect on that format. The Guardian spoke to Rundle in November 2021 about her music and career so far:

“The 38-year-old operates on the fringes of metal, but often shares more with the folk music she was raised on than with her heavier peers. However, the darkness in her music constantly draws fans from the metal community, and led to an acclaimed 2020 collaboration with sludge band Thou, May Our Chambers Be Full.

Inspired in part by time she spent alone on Wales’s stark Pembrokeshire coast before the pandemic, Engine of Hell is a complete departure from that noisy predecessor – not just sonically, but philosophically. Her lyrics have never been so detailed or naked; no words are minced when Emma sings about being “down at the methadone clinic” as a child, watching someone she loved suffer the consequences of heroin. She says that seeing addiction close at hand in her youth ended up fuelling her own, beginning at age 12, rather than warding it off, though she is keen not to implicate or blame anyone. A blunt anonymity pervades the whole record, giving us tiny yet unflinching glimpses into her own battle for sobriety while maintaining distance and privacy. “I was forced to confront certain things,” she says, adding that the piano, which she hadn’t played since she was a teenager, allowed her to sit still and reflect. After more than 20 years, she is now sober.

Rundle also divorced her husband Evan Patterson earlier this year, in a creative as well as romantic split: he was in her backing band on her previous album. “I take what I do very seriously and I won’t ever mix romance and artistic collaboration again,” she says. “There was always a sense of contention in our relationship because [Patterson] felt gratification having a creative partner but it didn’t work for me.” Her addiction issues weren’t helped either: “Our rock’n’roll lifestyle wasn’t good for me, or my body.”

Her self-reliance on Engine of Hell also comes from her experiences as a woman. “I’m apprehensive about involving other people in my work, because I’ve spent a long time getting out from behind men. Engine of Hell is a statement that I’m not going to involve people in making aesthetic choices, or compromise on the emotional content.”

Working with producer Sonny DiPerri, the record has a stripped-back feel, and the majority of it was performed live to create an imperfect, humanising tone. “I always knew that was going to be flawed, because I’m not a trained musician. For me it’s not about the technique as much as the catharsis.” This catharsis saturates the record, from Rundle’s lyrics to the “anti-production” (her words). “The way I knew I was going to record it – warts and all – helped to inspire me and made it feel safe”.

Apologies if the interview sourcing is a bit scattershot and random, but I have picked a few that I like and the extracts that I think are most relevant. This takes me to Stereogum and their fascinating and deep interview with an astonishing artist who has the ability to silence audiences and leave them absolutely stunned and entranced. Maybe someone whose music is not known in the mainstream because of its depth and beauty, Emma Ruth Rundle is someone whose music can be embraced and loved by anyone. Do go and check her out if you have not discovered Rundle yet:

“You’ve developed all of these associations with the guitar. What associations did you have coming back to the piano?

RUNDLE: Piano was my first real instrument. I took Celtic harp lessons when I was really little, that was technically my first instrument, but my dad is a pianist, he still plays all the time. So I grew up with the piano, I actually pursued it, I had a little scholarship at MI in LA for piano. And then as I started playing in bands and doing more with other people and trying to play shows, piano wasn’t working. Keyboards didn’t sound great at the time, and it was impractical. Guitar was just easier to play and take around, and I connected with it in a different way.

So going back now to piano and playing with it, there was this sort of bridge to a time in my life when I was younger, and I think that kind of opened up this portal to some of the experiences of my youth and what some of the songs are about. They all come from a time when I was playing piano. Like the song “Body,” my grandmother got me my first piano when I was living with her when I was a teenager, and I lived with her through to the end of her life. She supported my music and was really my person that took care of me and protected me and raised me. It was like a time machine; being with the piano took me back to that time when I was playing piano with her and what it was like to be with her at the end of her life.

Was there a certain moment for you that unlocked all these childhood memories?

RUNDLE: I’m not sure. Since we’re just talking about it now, I hadn’t really thought about how that piano was like a time machine, like a portal. You know those associations, like a scent can bring back memories, a feeling, a sound, and I guess for me the piano kind of did that, it opened up a lot of experiences. I’m not sure what did it, but this album was a reckoning with some of that past. I just had to deal with it I guess.

Is music the one conduit for unlocking those memories, or is there anything besides music that can help you access that?

RUNDLE: I’m not sure. The visual art stuff does to some degree, but I think music just has more of a connection there. And maybe because when I was younger, and especially the very young ages I had these experiences, at that time in my life music was so important, it was everything to me. In the writing of the record there are some purposeful nods to things that I was loving at that time. We talked about Boys For Pele. When I started playing the piano I was obsessed with Tori Amos. There’s kind of a meta quality to it where the songs are talking about an experience I had at that time and I’m using the instrument I played at that time with the influences of the music I liked at that time to sort of capture that for me.

Did you write these songs in a hurry? Did you feel a sense of urgency at all?

RUNDLE: Not at all. The songs took a long time to write, actually. Except for “In My Afterlife,” that song came really quickly, and it’s the last song I wrote. It’s about being at the edge of space, viewing life from this weird disconnected perspective, reliving things over and over again. That’s kind of what the idea of Engine Of Hell is, it’s this mechanism through which you’re forced to rewatch and relive memories over and over again”.

Before coming to a review for the sensational Engine of Hell, I want to drop in bits from Kerrang!. They produced, perhaps, the best interview with Emma Ruth Rundle around the release of her 2021 album. It is a good starting place for people who do not know about her and are curious to understand more:

“In January of 2020, Emma Ruth Rundle checked herself into a cottage in rural Wales for a month. Searching for time alone with her guitar in order to sink into the isolation and write new music after a month-long European tour, the rugged hills and the fact that, unlike in America, there’s “5,000-year-old Neolithic burial chambers that are just there”, provided a perfect setting in which to work.

What she was also looking for was a break. Something of a rolling stone by nature, the successes of her music – solo with 2018’s excellent On Dark Horses, her collaborations with artists like U.S. doom outfit Thou – had afforded her the opportunity to have a bohemian, rock’n’roll life, one in which there were few concerns besides music, touring and art. Money wasn’t bountiful, but that wasn’t so important when balanced out by doing what you love. Only, “It wasn’t working for me anymore.” She had begun to feel out of focus with her own life. Things weren’t quite lining up. Drink, drugs and a feeling of disconnection were beginning to outweigh the good.

“I started to realise I’d lost touch with who I was and my feelings,” she says. “I spent a long time trying to run away and push it all down.”

In Wales, Emma began to write what would become her fifth album, Engine Of Hell, intentionally to be a “stark” record, performed in bare-bones fashion on guitar and piano, in which in simplicity and lack of fuss would allow for an emotional intimacy. As she wrote and tuned into the darkness, and the darkness began to gaze back, she kept following it. And things began to come up.

“The more you uncover, the more the corpses reveal themselves,” she says. “I was excavating myself, like soul retrieval, trying to find my history again.”

Today, Emma says that Engine Of Hell represents a period of great change, some of which is still unfolding. When we join her drinking a cup of Earl Grey aboard a cheerfully colourful canal barge café moored on a West London stretch of the Grand Union Canal, she’s just spent a week travelling around the UK by train. Stopping in Edinburgh, the Scottish Isles and Worcester, she and a friend spent their time filming videos and visuals to accompany the album. Had all this been scheduled a couple of years ago, though, she says she probably would have cancelled.

“That’s a big change, being able to get on a train to come meet you, instead of being passed out on the side of the street somewhere,” she says. “I have had really bad anxiety in the past. I would have been just too freaked out to be able to leave my room.”

Engine Of Hell is a beautiful record. Stripped-down to bare elements that highlight the frailty at the soul of these songs, Emma describes this vision as “the most punk thing I could think to do”, to the point where recording was done in as few takes as possible, with no overdubs to correct mistakes, and even declining to have reverb on her vocals to preserve what was captured as purely as possible. In this vessel, with no distraction, the gently sung words take on an even deeper resonance.

PHOTO CREDIT: Emma Wondra

“It's very awkward, and almost oversharing. There was some hesitation about some of the content,” she admits. “There were moments where I really thought, ‘Can I say this publicly? Can I say this in a song that other people are going to listen to?’”

The knots Emma unties in the album stem from “really searching for myself”. In 2017, she moved from her long-time home in Los Angeles to Kentucky. It didn’t work out, and the distance between her new place and what she knew – “I had a rock’n’roll life and now I’m in Kentucky? What happened?” – turned into disconnection at home. Out on the road, in a more familiar environment, things were in some way better, but it was more distraction than solution.

“I really numbed myself out pretty intensely with drugs and alcohol,” she says. “I was just living on the road, not having to just be anywhere, or do anything. I’d just show up to a place and play a show, or go to the bar and freak out, having a cocaine explosion. Which was fun. But ultimately, it didn't really serve me.”

Emma Ruth Rundle says she doesn’t really think about if anyone is going to listen to her art, or get it, or even like it. That she made Engine Of Hell was a necessary part of something bigger. In that, it is its own reward. “I like to think about getting paid in soul tokens,” she says. “Like, you collect something in your soul that is what makes life worth living. And that's from where art is made for me.”

Though the conversation is heavy, she’s also truly delightful company. Whatever she’s talking about – music, her holiday, asking to have the concept of Naked Attraction properly explained in terms an American can understand – she does so with a warmth and friendliness that one feels lucky to find in a person. When she talks about the distance she’s come in her journey, she does so with an almost bashful sense of pride, but also an endearing, likeable one.

Emma says that she “doesn’t know if I’m ever going to be a happy person”, and admits that she doesn’t truly understand what that means anyway. But the experiences have “made me feel stronger, and I feel more centred and more present”. Engine Of Hell may document a low, but also the start of a new, hopefully more pleasant period, too.

“I really believe that music and art sometimes takes actual life sacrifices,” she says. “I think there's something powerful to that. And whether the album helped me make these big transformations, or those things were sacrifices that went into the making of this record, I don't think that it would ever be possible to replicate that. I mean, I've even cut off all my hair. I don't really have anything left to take away. I put it all into this one”.

I am going to wrap things up with a critical review for Engine of Hell. It is a magnificent album that every person needs to hear. It introduced me to the sound and sensation of Emma Ruth Rundle. This is what Pitchfork wrote in their review for the amazing Engine of Hell. If you have not heard this album, then I would thoroughly recommend that you check it out:

“Rundle’s power has grown with each new solo album. On 2014’s Some Heavy Ocean, she peeked out from the melancholic morass that characterized her contributions to the downcast post-rock of Marriages and Red Sparowes. She reincorporated her beloved reverb and death-march drum lines into 2016’s Marked for Death and 2018’s On Dark Horses, but these churning undercurrents were no match for her vocals. Collaborating with southern Louisiana sludge band Thou on 2020’s May Our Chambers Be Full, Rundle held her own. Her rich, smoky alto simmered in moments of bitter reflection and warped into a sneering falsetto when the pain flowed freely.

If that album’s brilliance was at times dimmed by sonic excess, Engine of Hell is crystallized by its austerity. It was recorded live, its instrumentation entirely acoustic. Rundle accompanies herself, alternating between piano and guitar. Her arrangements are sparse and simple, though her skill on the guitar is evident even when she’s merely strumming a few minor chords. Her relationship with the piano is more complicated: She played the instrument growing up but abandoned it in her 20s when she decided it didn’t fit her music. She’s a competent player, but her attack often feels tentative, and her voicings are uncharacteristically open and airy.

“Body” begins like an anonymous Lite FM ballad, but the melodramatic intro accentuates the grit in Rundle’s vocal delivery. Over childlike chords, she sings about the grandmother who bought her first piano and cared for her as a teenager until the older woman’s death. The consoling mantra of the chorus—“You know my arms are always around you”—echoes in her head as she watches her grandmother’s body being wheeled away. “We’re moving the body now,” she sings, as collaborator Troy Zeigler rasps the album’s only backing vocal, many octaves beneath her. In a different, earlier Rundle song, “moving the body” might have been the prelude to something more gothic and horrible, but here it’s an act of mourning and letting go.

Elsewhere on Engine of Hell, she cuts biblical allegories down to quotidian size. In “Blooms of Oblivion,” where she allows herself a modicum of lushness in the form of Jo Quail’s cello, Judas is a heroin addict waiting in line for methadone. And in “Razor’s Edge,” Lazarus is the traveling companion of a self-destructive twentysomething who’s “spending all my money as the petty cash of youth runs out.” Cryptic realism is Rundle’s strongest mode; the lyrics are less effective when they tend towards simple abstraction. “Citadel,” a baroque song-poem, feels detached without a more lifelike stand-in for the “fortress in my heart” or the “destroyer in my blood.”

If the first seven songs on Engine of Hell offer glimpses into Rundle’s worst moments, then the final track is where she casts her gaze toward eternity. “Taken to task in some engine of Hell/I lacked the toll to cross the river there,” she begins. Discussing the record with Stereogum, Rundle described the titular metaphor as “this mechanism through which you’re forced to rewatch and relive memories over and over again.” The raincloud hung heavy over her past four records; on Engine of Hell, it breaks open. The personal tragedies that come pouring out are scarier than any of the grisly apparitions she used to conjure”.

A singular talent whose music takes you to another place, go and check her out and music and follow her on social media. Someone who I have not known for that long, I am catching up and discovering the full extent of her talent and brilliance. Even though Emma Ruth Rundle has been on the scene for a while now, I don’t think she has a wide an audience as her music warrants. Even though I have put the focus on her previous studio album, EG2: Dowsing Voice was released this year and is very different to Engine of Hell. It shows the different sides and seemingly limitless ability and reach of such a special artist. Although there has not been this widespread embrace and recognition yet.…