Ross Goldstein
with Brian Dewan! $5
The last we heard from Ross Goldstein was his second solo album Inverted Jenny, a collection of blissful and exploratory orchestral pop that arrived in the late summer of 2017. Just a little over a year later Goldstein returns with The Eighth House, a complete shift of gears that finds him immersed in a cinematic dreamworld of instrumental sounds that still hold glimmers of the psychedelic spirit inherent to everything he touches.
The initial inspirations for the album began during sessions for Inverted Jenny, an album where Ross actually recorded and then removed vocals from many songs, opting for instrumentals that said more than lyrics could. Already leaning towards exploring deeper expression with instrumental compositions, he entered a phase of obsession with science fiction books and movies, as well as listening closer to soundtracks and incidental film music. Turning to an arsenal of classic Chamberlin and Mellotron sounds, he began composing the pieces that would become The Eighth House, fantastical and often slightly damaged scores to imagined scenes of both cosmic and Earthly.
While plenty of homage has been paid to the anxiety-heavy synthy soundtracks of 70’s b-movie horror flicks or the acid rock freak outs that soundtracked movies from the early days hippie subculture, The Eighth House goes in a very different direction. More than those popular entry points, the music here is subdued and slow-moving, curiously inspecting ideas as the album moves through various fantastical passages. Even when cartoonish sound effects meet with tense swells of strings or dramatic orchestral flourishes (early Chamberlin models recorded their sounds using players of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra, no less!), the result is never garish but always patient and communicative. Bells ring in the distance, memories and possibilities are implied but left open to interpretation and strange but friendly sounds linger for just a moment before melting into something else. The result is a muted and wintery paradise that envisions Smile-era Brian Wilson scoring the softer moments of a Jodorowsky film.
What’s most striking about The Eighth House is how much of Goldstein’s sonic personality comes through, even in music that’s in some ways striving to disappear into the background. Whether it’s lilting chamber pop, the screaming psychedelia of his band Fogwindow or in this case a slowly-unfolding narrative of celestial instrumentals, it’s all unmistakably Ross, reflecting an intrinsic kindness that’s always at odds with a restless searching. It’s definitely present on this album of drifting wordless compositions, as he offers us ripples of boundless imagination and just-out-of-reach impressions of other worlds.
credits
~releases October 26, 2018~
Brian Dewan is an artist who works in many media, including art, music, audio-visual performances, decorative painting, furniture design, poetry and musical instrument design. Dewan writes, narrates and illustrates I-CAN-SEE Filmstrips, and collaborates with his cousin Leon Dewan in the electronic music duo Dewanatron. He has produced four albums of songs and concertized extensively as a solo artist, as well as having performed in various collaborations and as a sideman. His musical releases include: Tells The Story, The Operating Theater, Words Of Wisdom, and Ringing At The Speed Of Prayer. Dewan lives in Catskill, New York.MORE
Shawn Stewart Ruff
Author Reading, in conversation with Jill Dearman! Free.
SHAWN STEWART RUFF
(born July 19, 1959) is an American novelist and editor who won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction at the 21st Lambda Literary Awards in 2008 for his debut novel Finlater. He has since published the novels Toss and Whirl and Pass (2010) GJS II (2016), Days Running (2025), and the novella One/10th (2013).
He was previously editor of the anthology Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Fiction by African-American Writers (1996), which was a shortlisted nominee for the Lambda Literary Award for Fiction Anthologies at the 9th Lambda Literary Awards in 1997.
A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, he studied English literature at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently based in New York City. He is also an established beauty, fashion and lifestyle copywriter, having worked for such brands as Chanel, Estee Lauder and Bergdorf Goodman.
ABOUT DAYS RUNNING
A dynamic portrait of one queer, Black boy’s experience in 1970s Cincinnati.
Sixteen-year-old Cliffy Douglas’s life is leveling up. An academic superstar on an accelerated path, he’s about to put high school behind him for college on the West Coast. His mentally ill father seems committed to seeking help for both his bipolar disorder and the PTSD brought back from the war in Vietnam. Cliffy even has a boyfriend—a summer romance that just might be the real thing.
But Cliffy’s life is flung into dangerous limbo after a vicious personal assault leaves him hospitalized, and with a terrible secret that threatens to ruin his escape from his claustrophobic family into a larger, more open world. As he recovers from his brutal attack, Cliffy must gather the complicated courage to face his assailant, demand justice, and fight off an encroaching despair that threatens his future.
With Days Running, novelist Shawn Stewart Ruff has created yet another dynamic portrait of one queer, Black boy’s experience in 1970s Cincinnati—chaotic family ties, the friction of shame and self-preservation, devastating violence, unexpected allies, and the desperate desire to break free.MORE
That Time of Year
A quarterly-ish reading series around a theme. Tonight's theme: Deep. Free.
DAWN LUNDY/MARTIN
is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers, Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was the first person to hold the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh where she co-founded and directed the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is currently working on memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books. She is Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS
works with poetry and prose as a writer, editor, translator, publisher, teacher, and designer. Her forthcoming novel, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, will be published in November 2024 by Soft Skull. Her most recent book is Participation (2022), a precarious novel about love & comradeship, the discomforts of desire, forms and functions of labor, and the embodied experience of reading and being read. Other books include the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, and poetry books They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent translation is of David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood Is Black (Frère d’âme), for which she and Diop received the 2021 International Booker Prize. She has also translated Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, Bresson on Bresson, and (with Christine Schwartz-Harley) Marcelle Sauvageot’s Commentary. She is a student of plants and herbalism, a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, and a co-founder of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY. She is currently at work on a novel, a book of essay-poems, an experimental documentary, and a collaborative translation of Mihret Kebede’s #evolutionarypoems, forthcoming from Circumference Books.
MARIANNE SHANEEN
is a writer of fiction, essays, and poetry. She has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, and the Tusen Takk Foundation (2021). She received her MFA in writing from the Bard Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Her fiction “The Mason Jar” was published in The Kenyon Review (Sept/Oct 2020), and her work has appeared in Bomb magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, the book Monstrous Adaptations (Manchester University Press), Vanitas, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Lucent Amnesis was published by Portable Press/Yo-Yo Labs. She has also worked in documentary video, and was awarded a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant for her poetic, playful, provocative video essay exploring fluid identity and trans-species possibility. Recently, Shaneen wrote a text and voiceover for the essay film Kansas Atlas by filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh which screened at the 2020 New York Film Festival and in numerous galleries. Shaneen has been commissioned to write for Henry Gallery in Washington, for the film and installation Bugs and Beasts Before the Law by collaborative duo Bambitchell (2021), as well as for solo shows by artists such as Suzanne Kite (2021), Miruna Dragan, Barbara Ess, and choreographer Rebecca Davis. Shaneen is currently finishing her first novel, Homing.
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Books are available for purchase and signing.
Created and Hosted by Andrea Kleine.
This event is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.