RICH RUTH

Rich Ruth biography
RICH RUTH - a.k.a. veteran Nashville-based musician Michael Ruth - took a break from touring with various bands in 2018 and dedicated himself to composing ambient music in his small home studio in North Nashville, focusing on the diverse traditions of ambient, new age, spiritual jazz, Kosmische, and minimalist music. His ideas became fully realized with the inclusion of additional players, pairing his repetitive, droning synthesizer movements with spur-of-the-moment improvisation to transform the material into something much more lush and unpredictable.

One summer morning, Ruth was held up at gunpoint and carjacked by two people outside his home. His music allowed him to work through this personal struggle, infusing his 2019 debut album "Calming Signals" with striking layers of angst and emotion. The album title refers to the way dogs communicate stress and use certain mechanisms to calm themselves or reset. "Where There's Life" followed in 2021, a collection of meditative pieces written in the early months of the COVID pandemic manifesting the collective sense of uncertainty and solitude of the time.

The year after, number 16 in MOJO's best albums of 2022, the instrumental "I Survived, It's Over" was released, a dark, kosmische and psychedelic mix of Jazz Rock and electronics experimentation over mantra like drones and minimal hypnotic motifs recorded in the midst of the pandemic and in the wake of a series of tornadoes that wrecked havoc his North Nashville neighborhood. "'I Survived, It's Over' is a meditation on healing, confronting trauma, surrendering, and finding peace," Ruth says. "I constantly experiment with sound until it reflects the I am feeling and attempt to sculpt something meaningful from it."

The music will appeal to fans of Brian Eno, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and Pharoah Sanders.



- earlyprog, March 2023