R.J.F.: Cleaning Out The Empty Administration Building (opaque white vinyl) LP

"Cleaning Out The Empty Administration Building" is Ross Farrar's latest offering of raw, spoken word abstraction and experimental sound design, presented here as R.J.F. The front man for Ceremony and SPICE realized his solo recording project initially as a challenge, to write songs from the ground up, learning the instrumentation and excavating his subconscious in the process. The point was not fluency in musicianship as much as vulnerability; to pull something honest from a moment, unguarded, unpolished, unapologetically amateur and pure. The collection finds Farrar engaged in open-ended poetic dialogue, crossing drum patterns and found sounds with stabs of guitar, bass, and keys. After over twenty years in the comfort and chaos of collaboration, Farrar sheds it all as a test. The results are distinctive and stirring. Farrar's punk pathos is present in traces of "Cleaning", while his clearest cues come from music built more through repetition: drone, no-wave, avant-jazz, and beyond. His plainspoken prose nods to Lou Reed, Rowland S. Howard and other weirdo greats. His lyrics riff on love, addiction, fatherhood, and life in the modern world.