By now, many of the regular readers of Rebel should be familiar with the prolific Baltimore-native Sam Ray’s work under the name Ricky Eat Acid. Over the past year, through several different genre-spanning releases, his work has been steadily turning up in corners all over the internet, even with his interpretation of Rihanna’s track ‘Only Girl in The World’ being included on a mixtape curated by Jamie XX for Fact Magazine and coverage by Fader Magazine.
With roughly twelve releases name since he first began releasing music online in March of 2010, Ricky Eat Acid is an undeniably prolific and highly talented new presence in music today. Highlighting the true spirit of the Napster-generation musician, his work experiments with a huge variety of sonic influence and never stays steeped in one style for longer than his attention span allows. Digging into eclectic his back catalog, there are moments that point to ambient and drone music, acoustic instrumentals, glitch and hip-hop / beat music.
His latest release Seeing Little Ghosts Everywhere is a tape-machine song-diary that he created over the past summer with the intent of distilling moments, places and feelings into tangible recorded forms. Each track is a tiny window into an individual moment or thought that Sam wanted to challenge himself into creating a narrative for. For the physical release of this album, Sam Ray also showcased his talents as a photographer, using a different photo for each of the (now sold out) 20 copies that were created.
Sam and I sat down and had an exchange over Facebook Chat, the principal mode of communication that we’ve used to get to know eachother over the past months. We covered a range of topics including toy cameras, the death of uncool, and the story of the greatest roller-skater in the world.
Hey Sam, how are you doing and what are you up to today?
Haha well, I just finished writing a ten-page paper that you should not ask me about because if you do I will go on to tell you everything I know about subtext in children’s literature and information processing, but I’m actually great because I kind of love this topic.
That sounds awesome. What are you studying in school right now?
Man, just a ton of English / history stuff that I love but I’m not sure will get me anywhere in life. I’d really love to work with composition again or audio engineering but if I attempt to switch majors to music I’d be in college another four years probably.
You’d definitely excel at it if you were to make the switch, but I understand the logic. That brings me to my next question; you just released your album Seeing Little Ghosts Everywhere; how did you develop the idea for that album?
I’ve been working on a ‘real’ LP as Ricky Eat Acid for over a year now, but this past spring I got a new tape player and I just love tape players. Recording with them is so lo-fi and beautiful and they all sound unique and I love it so I started recording short ‘anti-songs’.
The first one I recorded didn’t actually make it on the album because it was too personal. It was actually just me singing acapella, sort of a typical pop/folk song taken apart and dissected. After that I played with recording backwards samples live, stuff like that and I decided to try and record a whole album of short ‘anti-songs’ in this way, but somewhere along the way ‘anti-songs’ turned into ‘anti-drone’ and by that I mean I’d write these really long form drone songs and then record maybe one or two minutes of them so it was like little drone vignettes.
Ricky Eat Acid – Hanging Out In The Valley
I’ve always loved ambient and drone music and this summer I really became obsessed with the idea of music as a means of evoking place, time, or feeling instead of telling some kind of narrative. It’s the same way I like to approach photography, actually. I like photos that have a strong sense of composition, but it’s easy to miss because the focus is more on texture or tone which I guess leads to the photos I used for the project.
That’s amazing, I definitely view the photos you used as just as integral to the album as the music; for the 20 cassette tapes you made for your album, each was printed with a unique cover with a photo you had taken. Do you see your music and photography as linked in any way? Do you feel like they inform each other?
First of all, yes, a thousand times.
I feel like music should be, above all, visual. It doesn’t have to be, of course, but the music I personally connect with is very visual to me. I imagine myself listening to it at a specific time, or in a specific place, whether or not that time or place is real, so I’ve always loved writing songs that encapsulate certain places or moments in time for me. Sometimes I’ll go out exploring just to get inspiration for a song.
Once I wrote a song eulogizing my favorite hat because I lost it while wandering around lost in the woods during a snowstorm, and I attempted to write a song that sounded like being lost in the woods at night during a snowstorm. I’m not sure I succeeded, but it was definitely incredibly fun trying to capture that.
So this project was very much about place, and being in certain places at certain times, and I feel those photos compliment that, or at least I hope they do, because they all represent certain places I’ve been, of course. Also, stylistically, I tried to use photos where I approached composition and technique the same way I approached the songs on the album. My friend made fun of me actually because he said the photos I chose were just as lo-fi as the songs I recorded.
Ricky Eat Acid – It Rained For So Long That My House Floated Away and I Drowned
Haha yeah! That’s what’s so amazing, the grain of the film really sits well with the hiss on the recordings, they’re a perfect companion.
Thank you! Yes, I think the whole analog thing is big in both the recordings and photos.
How and when did you develop an interest in photography? Was it prior to your development in making music?
Not really, I was interested in music since I was a little kid and started writing it more seriously when I was maybe a freshman in high school. I started becoming more interested in photography around the same time, I suppose, probably more towards sophomore year. One of the photos I used is actually from my sophomore year. I shot some digital stuff back then but I was still really interested in film. I can’t really say how I got interested in photography, probably because a girl I knew liked it or something so I thought I’d do it too. Honestly, I don’t remember.
But a big part of why I stuck with it was actually just cause all my friends were skater kids and I wanted to hang out with them, and since I’m a terrible skater, that was my excuse to hang around. Until my friend Aaron took it up as well and became a million times better than I’ll ever be.
Haha, I’m sure that’s not true, your photography work is amazing. I’m glad that you’re so dedicated to using 35mm too, it really suits the subject matter that you shoot.
Thank you! I want to graduate to 120 but medium format cameras are pretty expensive to delve into. Plus I love the portability of 35mm. I actually shoot a lot with point-and-shoot film cameras, fake panoramic cameras, toy cameras, fixed focus stuff, etc. Photos taken with them are very distinctive and I love it. They’re kind of the ‘cheap tape players’ of photography I guess so it’s only fitting.
That’s so cool, I love the same kind of stuff. I’m actually bidding on a Polaroid OneShot 1000 on eBay right now, it looks so amazing.
That’s awesome though, I hope you win it! I always hit up old thrift stores and estate stales and stuff for camera and music gear. I’m kind of a hoarder for old cameras and toy instruments.
What’s the story behind the monologue on ‘Dead Baby Bunny’ or ‘Happy Hymn’ or some of the other sound bytes on the album?
A lot of the sound clips were things I’d found randomly while looking around. I really like taking things out of context and giving them new meaning. Like on, ‘happyhappyhappy’, the sound clip was from a kid about to have oral surgery. But the two you mentioned are very different. ‘Happy Hymn ‘I recorded in my living room, and the beginning is just my mom and I talking about the song. ‘Dead Baby Bunny’ I recorded this one day when my cats accidentally killed a baby bunny when they were trying to play with it. They kept going over to it and nudging it and then looking up at me sadly and crying because they wanted it to wake up and play with them. It twitched for a while and then died, and I buried it in my garden, which is actually what the song ‘Turn into Flowers’ is about.
Ricky Eat Acid – Turn Into Flowers
That’s on one of the album covers, too, isn’t it?
Yes, one of the covers is actually a picture from that day of my cats with the dead baby bunny.
Many of the songs on the album have some kind of narrative to them in that way, whether real or imagined. ‘The King Of All Rollerskaters’ is about the greatest roller-skater in the world and he’s known everywhere for how good he is and everyone loves him. But he’s filled with an intense longing that makes him feel incredibly hollow and empty and he can’t figure out why, so he keeps skating, trying to figure out what’s missing.
This is a bit of a lowball question but I’m really interested in origins of names; how did you decide upon the name Ricky Eat Acid for your music work?
Well I named it after my friend Ricky and a weird night we had together which is probably one of my favorite memories of my whole life. The actual name came from a note that I left my mom that just said ‘ricky eat acid’ so she’d know where I was (this was when I was senior in highschool).
Your music spans a great deal of genres, sounds and styles. Where are your musical roots located though?
I think beyond all else I just love evocative music. Which is typically sad music. I love music to sleep too, I love drone, I love ambient music, beautiful stuff. Type Records is probably my favorite label ever of all time. And the experimental stuff labels like Kranky and Fatcat, etc., all the classic ones like that put out is all so cool. Not to mention a million really amazing smaller labels. Wigflip is great for weird ambient stuff – Cache’s album “Swole” is one of my all time favorite ambient albums, just weird piano and voice.
There is so much cool stuff happening right now, and I don’t want to come across as negative with this, but honestly I like a ton of music when it’s trying to do something unique. I get really sick of hearing a ton of bands and artists merely trying to copy what other people are doing. I’d rather make albums that fail miserably but attempt something new than do something I know I can do pretty well but have absolutely no inspiration or desire to do. And not to sound like every other person on earth right now, but it’s amazing living right now because I can basically keep doing that and keep putting albums online just for myself and let anyone who wants them download them for free. Which is amazing.
But I mean, I also totally love Waka and Gucci and I’m so excited about Take Care. I grew up listening to punk, the first show I ever saw was Fugazi when I was a toddler, so I’m kind of all over the place.
Ricky Eat Acid – King of All Roller Skaters
I like that though. It’s so interesting to me how our generation of musicians and creative people have grown up with access to endless amounts of culture, so everyone has the endless option to combine all sorts of ideas from every corner of culture to create things that are seemingly new, challenging or unique.
Yeah! I love that about music right now. Some of my favorite bands right now have such a strange mix of influences, including many that might be conventionally pretty ‘uncool’.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I feel like the idea of the ‘uncool’ is kind of dying. People don’t really seem to harbor the same kind of guilty pleasure mentality towards stuff that might have seemed really lame like 10 years ago.
Yeah I agree! The whole idea of liking things for liking them and not liking something just ironically is coming up now I feel like, or at least I hope it is. Maybe it just is among my friends.
I really loved your recent collaboration with Arrange that you two put out not that long ago. Do you guys have any plans to work on anything else together in the future?
Yeah! We actually have another song recorded that’s pretty similar to it but also pretty different. We’d really love to release them together – maybe a 7″ or something? But we have no idea yet. I’d really, really love to work with Malcorn more in the future – he’s such a rad dude and an amazing musician.
Ricky Eat Acid – happyhappyhappy
Do you have any other plans for Ricky Eat Acid right now?
Well I’d love to do live shows – I’m working on getting the equipment together that I need for it. Ideally I’d love to play live without any laptops or anything like that; just samplers and live instruments, looping, tons of vocals. I want to focus way more heavily on drones, vocals, beats. I also have this dream of projecting N64 games on a screen and letting the crowd play each other in like, Super Smash Bros. or Mario Kart while I soundtrack it, but that will all take a TON of work.
As for releases, there’s the stuff I’ve recorded with Malcorn and hopefully more to come. There’s an ambient split that Malcorn and I recorded over the summer that I’m honestly in love with, and I’m dying that it’s not out already, but digital splits seem kind of pointless and no one wants to press it. And then there’s the full length I’ve been working on forever that I’ll hopefully have out next year!
I’m so excited about it all, I hate being one of those people who releases things all the time, but I can’t help it – there’s no other way to improve at something than try and do it constantly if I paced myself I’ll never get better.
–
Seeing Little Ghosts Everywhere, along with the rest of Ricky Eat Acid’s music, can be found on his Bandcamp.
Photography by Sam Ray
Cover photo by Eric Livingston
