Bing & Ruth - No Home of the Mind

Pitchfork 82

Bing & Ruth’s music exists in the cracks between. Project leader David Moore has a degree in music and his earlier compositions, found on the 2010 album City Lake, can have the air of the conservatory. So it makes some sense to slot his work in with contemporary classical. But the era of classical music Moore most frequently evokes—the trance-inducing minimalism of the 1960s and ’70s—has at times been filed as new age. And divisions between that genre and the more critically acceptable sphere of “ambient,” a word that sometimes describes Bing & Ruth, have always been porous. Beyond these labels, Bing & Ruth is also hard to pin functionally. Moore’s pieces can feel formal, less like “environments” and more like compositions that need to be tracked carefully over their duration to be understood. Though he’s made music for an ensemble that includes woodwinds and strings, Moore also includes processed tapes and production choices that smudge the lines between acoustic and electronic music.

On City Lake and 2014’s Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, Moore’s music evoked the best of what had come before him—Philip Glass’ repetition, the emotional shading of Max Richter, Eluvium’s comfort with rock dynamics—but he’s steadily grown into a sound that feels all his own. No Home of the Mind, his third proper album and first for 4AD, is his most distinctive record yet. His working group is still here, but the arrangements on No Home feature Moore’s piano much more prominently, and it’s a more focused record. If City Lake and Tomorrow sometimes found him moving between established styles, demonstrating wide-ranging mastery because he can, the new album stays focused on wringing as much feeling as possible out of narrower terrain. And No Home of the Mind is the earthiest Bing & Ruth record yet. You can smell the sweat that went into it.

One of Moore’s composition signatures is to turn the piano into a drone instrument. Using rapid clusters of repeating notes, Moore creates piano figures that hang in space like clouds of slowly shifting sound, not unlike passages of La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano or the work of Young acolytes like Michael Harrison. Where the latter two artists are known for using the piano as a tool for overtones via specialized tuning, Moore creates piano-based drones that serve as the basis for his ensemble pieces. The other instruments’ parts exist in relationship to what he’s doing at the keyboard, offering contrasting textures and leading through varying shifts in mood and tone. It’s almost as if all the separate parts come together into a single instrument, one that is “played” collectively by the Bing & Ruth ensemble.

“Starwood Choker” starts the album sounding like a continuation of the last Bing & Ruth record’s criss-crossing tapestries of sound. But the record really begins to reveal itself on “As Much as Possible,” which finds Moore in the realm of “solo piano with ambient treatments” à la Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s The Pearl. Moore’s chord voicings suggest both gospel music and the spare “furniture music” of Satie. As he moves between modes, extremely subtle bits of tension are introduced, built, and then released, while yawning chasms of drone from the ensemble drift in and out beneath. “As Much as Possible” is Moore’s most tender and affecting piece yet, a filmic work that evokes haunting images on its own.

Throughout the rest of No Home, the piano moves between heavy drone (“Form Takes”), achingly spare and meditative ballads (“To All It”), and pieces that explore how much can be done with simple repetition (“The How of It Sped”). The tracks flow one into the next, which accentuates the connections between them and makes No Home feel like a single massive piece, carefully mapping every inch of its defined terrain. Moore is so gifted at teasing out emotion, it seems inevitable that there will be many film and television scores in his future, if he chooses to go that route. If that happens, No Home of the Mind will be remembered as his breakthrough, the place where all the pieces from earlier records snapped into place.