The 1981 Listening Post - John Ruth (AKA John Ruskan) - I Am a Model

 Reviewed by Kelly Hoben / LISTENING POST DISCOVERY

Released: 1981 John Ruth (AKA John Ruskan) I Am A Model Genre: Minimal Synth Pop Rating: 4.75 out of 5 Highlights: 50 Mile Radius (it’s how I imagine transcendental meditating while sitting on a cloud in Super Mario World would sound) Experimental synth sounds that still surprise 42 years later, minimal melodies, and repeating bass lines create a dark and magnetic synth-pop landscape. It’s hard to write this review because Ruskan’s (essentially) one-man band pulls me into a state of mind more conducive to painting or staring at the ceiling than writing. As expressed in Kick Me In The Bed, “Practicing Serious Introspection” is what the album is really about. John Ruskan said in an interview that he wants to dispense with the foreground and background in music because their separation is symptomatic of western thinking and the ego-mind. He calls this criterion “equal prominence,” and he identifies in trip-hop and ambient music. I had already been familiar with his 1997 ambient album Desert Dawn when Sheffield hit me with I Am a Model, and that felt like synchronicity, and then I found out that Ruskan is interested in Jungian psychology and yoga nidra, and basically I’m a total fan girl now. I get the sense of “equal prominence” perhaps best on Ordinary Mood, which has a satisfying monotony. He sees himself as an artist, and some of his more-spoken-than-sung lyrics are about sculptures and paintings, but it sounds genuine, like when David Byrne sings about art, and Ruskan has actually written books about aesthetics. I’d classify him as an Expressionist / Cognitivist—he says music embodies emotion and art can be a means to evolve consciousness. The sounds he elicits from the technology all over the album attest to his own mechanical engineering artistry with the monophonic synthesizer. Ruskan talks about trance music transcending the ego-mind by getting into the body, and he inspires that bodily awareness by increasing rhythmic components and decreasing melodic components. It works for me.