Ruhe ~ A Beautiful Weakness

The latest release on Audio Gourmet may represent its best tea break to date.  Imagine setting fifteen minutes aside to enjoy a cup of tea.  While your tea is brewing, you retrieve your mail and find the following: a slightly detuned music box playing a song from your childhood; a photograph of the house in which you grew up; and a letter of forgiveness from a long-lost friend.  The tea might be forgotten in a spring of happy tears.

Nostalgia is a beautiful weakness that few would wish to abandon.  The condition may be called sentimental, the opposite of a stiff upper lip, and yet it is precious to those who experience it.  Bryan Ruhe‘s EP awakened this sense in me immediately upon my initial listen.  The 25-second “Wilted” shares the music box sounds of “The Way We Were”, a song that I hated as a child, and yet a song that still reminds me of how my classmates and I bonded at recess over our mutual disdain.  Yes, we were music snobs even then.  This was an adult song, and we were not yet adults; nor were we cognizant of “the way we were”, which to us simply meant that once we were not as good at maths, or football.  The swiftness of nostalgia always comes as a shock, as does its extent.  29/30ths of the EP had yet to play, and already it had done its job.

The wonderful thing about nostalgia is how completely it can gloss over the pain of departed years.  A music box, a piano, and the scratch of a record help listeners to remember a time that might not even have existed, in which they were happy and carefree.  Ruhe uses these tools to create a sonic scrapbook of his own beautiful weakness, his toy chest of treasured charms.  It then becomes the listener’s as well.  The metal switch is wound and released; the static charge advances; the rain falls outside the sullen house.  Keys and clocks and clatches vie for attention.  The imagination fills with “what ifs” that look into the future with possibility, instead of into the past with regret.

This collage of a recording is beautiful in the traditional sense, like one’s favourite faded wallpaper, the sway of curtains across a sickbed, the sight of glitter and glue, the scent of sugar and sprinkles.  Broken toys are still beloved toys, sometimes even more so for their fragility.  We press the rewind button on the old tape machine, preferring to listen to the old mix tape made by the old hands.  The bicycle may be gone, but we’ve kept the rusted bell.  Ruhe reflects all of these feelings and more.  A Beautiful Weakness may be a personal document, but now it’s ours as well.  (Richard Allen)

Available here