Strange sounds for summer ears

Introducing the ambient soundtrack to your midnight bang-cutting episode, screaming fit of rage, gym-time gains, soft shedding of tears, early dawn nature walk. Behold the album “Three Love Songs” by artist Ricky Eat Acid and your underground discovery into this nostalgic and experimental track of noise. For beauty that seems to be incomprehensible, “Three Love Songs” embodies that sound. 15 tracks, 49 minutes–Sam Ray’s album from 2016 boasts 11k views on YouTube. Listen to “Three Love Songs” with headphones–you’ll want to hear all the sounds. 

Artist Sam Ray has many pseudonyms and occupies a plethora of titles on music platforms. More than his number of titles, however, Sam Ray’s variety vibrates a diverse palette for enjoyers of anything, from static white noise to soulful howling. 

In Sam Ray’s “Three Love Songs”–among his most experimental albums–Sam Ray finds new ways to invade, or comfort, the ear. He conveys beauty in static swells of sound that are just bizarre. It feels as though you are not looking through your own eyes, but someone else’s fuzzy vision and all the lines have become soft. You may attempt to understand, but one will find it’s easier to sit back and listen, to watch the noise instill and let the thoughts or the tears or the smiles follow. “Three Love Songs” sounds like the brain waves of plants, and the songs that rain sing as it falls from the vast sky. 

Of the more intense features of the track is track #5, “In Rural Virginia; Watching Glowing Lights Crawl from the Dark Corners of the Room.” Even the title latches itself onto you like a slimy something, crawling from the dark corners of your imagination. The track opens with the passionate recitation, distant in its meaning, though you get the feeling it’s something great and true. The recitation fades and in its place is a messy web of sounds that harmonize into a great piece of…something.

My personal favorite, and also the most popular of this album–“Inside my house; some place I keep dreaming.” Chimes and noisy wind inhale and exhale, climaxing to an intertangle of gentle synths and wavering static–ever-present in almost every track. Faintly, you can feel birds chirping, and suddenly you are transported to an otherly space, one where you cannot grasp the ground below or the sky above but just the empty space that encloses you. It is like you are traveling through the wrinkles in time, traversing the crevices of sound that we overlook, or purposely ignore because on the surface, they are ugly.

Other tracks such as  “It Will Draw Me Over to It Like It Always Does,” has a more lo-fi feel to it, with a minor tune as a foundation. The track is easier on the ears of those listeners new to experimental music. 

For those new to music like this, it can be difficult to sit through this album without keeping your mind, or your hands busy. At times, “Three Love Songs” is not forgiving on the ears, and other times, the beauty seems to capture you whole, and it touches you in the heart spreading outwards to the tips of your fingers. 

This dusty album was uncovered hazily, just as hazy as the music itself sounds. As I was listening to one of Sam Ray’s albums “Starry Cat” under the same pseudonym–“Starry Cat,”–I was curious to see more of Sam Ray’s unique take on sound. After a quick Google search of Sam Ray, I stumbled across an article and down the rabbit hole I went. The article, written by a nameless high school newswriter from Plain City, Ohio, is a reminder that to the average listener such as you and I, experimental sounds can be something other than 100 Gecs, and they can be wholly beautiful. His article serves as a guide to Sam Ray’s extensive discography and is a sure way to explore more of Sam Ray’s confusing yet rewarding music. 

“Three Love Songs” proves that it is worth experimenting to find the beautiful. Use this album as ambient background noise or take an intense dive into all the sounds of this soft, strange album to get you through your summer.