Ruth Garbus

Songs are awake when you sing them. Electricity flows between the performer and the performee: Alive People. It feels and vibrates in front of a velvet curtain, and all the way to the back of the club. Electricity flows through the board and the amps and the mics. The whole room is a body of different kinds of waves and they become one thing. To capture that, and then be able to take those clean tapes – direct – and get them mixed by Justin Pizzoferrato like they were printed in a soundproof recording cave...that creates the potential for magic. A glittering, frontal, activated, sumptuous play emerging from the wave of a misty sparkler. Ruth Garbus’s Alive People is a studio album full of underground anthems for sensitive people of all ages that happened to be recorded in a club with an audience of a hundred. In between the compositions are interstitial improvisations that happened on stage during the performance. These are not presented in sequence. It’s not a lesser copy of a moving experience. It’s an echoing recreation, traveling- out photons bent thru and into a pastel rainbow. Ruth was joined on stage at different points by collaborators: elie mcafee-hahn on synth and bass, Julie Bodian on atypical guitars, Julia Tadlock on voice and presence. Nick Bisceglia engineered, with Ruth’s two vocal mics taped together, the room split to its mid and sides, the pop filter a matte circle in front of the shimmering curtain. Raising the wand and looking up you see on one side an evergreen, on the other a childhood bedroom, and in between Alive People. All the compositions on Alive People are by Ruth Garbus (b. 1981), a resident of Brattleboro, VT. Other current projects include Earth Flower and Gloyd. Alive People will be released on Orindal Records on August 25, 2023.