THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “If you’ve spent any time over the last decade or so rooting around the liner notes of records or in front of stages from DIY spaces to packed out theaters you may have noticed the name and/or the radiantly smiling frame of Ryan Jewell. Ryan plays drums with a technical acumen that one could easily describe as rare, but with an aesthetic approach that only seems appropriate to catalog as alchemical. A true session man, in the most cosmic sense, Jewell has played with everyone from psych legends to contemporary indie darlings to underground noiseniks and wandering troubadours.
Ryan is one of those most exotic of rare birds – a multi-instrumentalist and composer who is not only accomplished in the art of vibrating strings or skins, tickling the proverbial ivories, or manipulating magnetic tape but who has a discernibly unique voice on each instrument. Generally such talents would allow an artist access to a myriad of directions through the aural garden of forking paths. But Jewell has taken a hatchet to that verdure and reoriented it into a musical biodome where rock, folk, jazz, psych, musique concrète and post-punk all resonate together at most pleasing frequency. Lucky for us he’s decided to share the results.
Mosses is at its core a duo — Mr. Jewell and Danette Bordenkircher. The two share an almost telepathic musical connection; a four armed musical Shiva with a deep knowledge of the last century of recorded sound. On T.V. Sun, their first physical LP (not counting a micro edition 8×10” lathe from 2015) they are augmented by a host of talented friends from around the globe.
Harkening back to the middle part of the last century when many artists embraced the wonder and joy of subverting expectations across the two sides of an LP, T.V. Sun soothes, disrupts, confuses, delights and bewilders in equal measure, but always with intent and never in a way that exiles one from their fantasia. From the opening sweeps of the prepared piano on the flute tinged Tall Bearded Iris Speckled, through the blissed space-funk of the title track, to the dilated communal folk of the lead single Another Plan and acid fried kaleidoscopic whirls through Appalachia (Crazy Wind), art punk (MSR), freeform freakout (Mynd), and the Fourth World (You Can’t Fall Off a Mountain), Mosses bring the listener with them on their travels through the inner and outer cosmos.”
