Lake Ruth ‘To Erika’ – Video Premiere
LAKE RUTH’s new album Hawking Radiation (Feral Child / Dell’Orso) arrives on 6th June. Here’s the spellbinding video for ‘To Erika’
This is the third album by Lake Ruth and their first since Birds Of America in 2018 with Allison explaining that the album took a long time to write particularly with the interruption of the pandemic and then two of the members making an interstate jump. Dell’Orso label boss Guy Sirman talked to Allison about the making of the album and its themes.
Introduce yourself.
My name is Allison Brice, and I am the vocalist and one of the songwriters for the group, Lake Ruth. Hewson Chen is our other songwriter, as well as our producer and multi-instrumentalist, and Matt Schulz is our drummer and percussionist. We formed in 2015, and had all played in other groups for many years – Matt in Enon and Holy Fuck, Hewson in The New Lines, and me in The Eighteenth Day Of May and The Silver Abduction. We were drawn together through mutual appreciation of each other’s work, and a desire to explore the more psychedelic dimensions of cinematic art-pop together. We’re heavily influenced by ’60s and ’70s baroque pop, Italian library music, obscure soundtracks, classic soft-psych and a lot of modern jazz.
Does the album have an agenda, themes or motifs?
The album is a constellation of voices, stories and influences.
Around the time that we finished Birds Of America, I found myself simultaneously listening to the novel Children of Time by Andrian Tchiakovsky and the podcast, Heaven’s Gate, which was written, produced and hosted by Glynn Washington of Snap Judgement. I was familiar with Heaven’s Gate, and remembered the mass suicide of 1997, but had no real knowledge of the cult leaders, members, or survivors. I recalled the ’90’s media coverage as sensationalist and insensitive. Glynn’s approach was remarkable, and the fact that he grew up in – and escaped from – an apocalyptic cult himself, imbued his storytelling with authentic empathy. He centred the voices of the survivors and the bereaved, in ways that moved me deeply. We began to imagine a story about fate, the cosmos and the afterlife, as experienced through the voices of the faithful and the celestial recipients of their devotion.
How does the album title and artwork relate?
The album artwork is an illustration by the amazing Nick Taylor, and we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. The image is inspired by Frank Lyford, a survivor of the Heaven’s Gate cult. Of all the voices in the podcast, it was Frank’s voice that shook me the most. The trauma of his experience, of his loss, is so painfully evident in his expression. There is devastation in his voice, but also a quiet strength, a sense of acceptance. I asked Nick to listen to Frank’s story while he worked, and gave him the opening verse of the song, “To Erika” which is written from Frank’s perspective.
As for the album title, well, throughout the writing process, Hewson and I had been comparing the nature of a cult to that of a black hole – this powerful singularity with a terrifying, all-consuming gravity. It became something of an extended metaphor for us. Then, Hewson watched The Leftovers and some ideas about the premise of a “Sudden Departure” found their way into what became the album’s title track. I didn’t know what Hawking Radiation was at the time, and learned that it was a type of theoretical energy that a black hole emits, after it swallows something up. It’s paradoxical, because nothing, not even light, is supposed to escape. The event horizon of a black hole is thought to be a threshold from which, once crossed, nothing can return. Yet, something appears to. Hawking Radiation has never been observed, but if it exists then the information lost when objects enter a black hole isn’t truly lost – not entirely. Much like the dead living on in the memories and voices of the bereaved.
Where, how and when was it recorded?
The album was written and recorded over a period of about five years, then mixed over about a year or so. Early in the process, we were sidetracked by work on the songs which would become our 2020 EP, Crying Everyone Else’s Tears. Then, the pandemic hit and there was a lot of upheaval, with Matt moving from New York to Ohio and me from Miami to Atlanta. Hewson was the only one of us to stay put in Brooklyn, and he gradually assembled the album from all of our ideas and audio, which were recorded in various locations, at home and in different studios. The finished product was mixed by Geoff Sanoff in NYC and mastered by Matthew Barnhart in Chicago.
What was different about this record than previous recordings?
We worked as we always have, bouncing audio and ideas back and forth in our little long-distance recording collective. All in constant communication with each other, sometimes taking a song through multiple versions until we settle on what works best. We’re all DIY and home recording enthusiasts; necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. We work in closets, pantries, bedrooms, basements, and occasionally, a nice studio for the drums. Somehow, we’ve crafted a rather expansive sound from these tiny, humble spaces. As usual, the production budget was tight, but we were blessed with a little sync money from our song ‘VV’, which appeared on the critically acclaimed and dearly missed TV show, Lodge 49. So, huge thanks to creator Jim Gavin and music supervisor Tom Patterson for funding this album!
We also spoke specifically about ‘To Erika’ which is the video made by Bobby Klang.
We wrote a pair of songs inspired by Erika Ernst, who had been the partner of Heaven’s Gate survivor Frank Lyford. Frank and Erika had joined the cult as a young couple, and although Frank defected, he could not convince Erika to do the same, and she lost her life in the mass suicide of 1997. The voice in this song is that of my imagined Frank Lyford, outside on a clear, winter’s night, looking up at the cosmos, and grieving for the loss of his partner, Erika Ernst. He’s wracked with survivor’s guilt, and feels a prisoner of his own conditioning. The album’s cover artwork was inspired by the song’s first verse: “I’m looking upward to the sky, in one direction on the chance that you are – poised in Orion overhead, while I’m here imprisoned on the surface.”
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