The music of Sam Ray’s Ricky Eat Acid project has always elicited a kind of déjà vu. Whether it’s his journal-entry song titles or the way his music sounds like field recordings of a mental thunderstorm, the experimental producer/songwriter tricks you into thinking you are hearing extracted elements of your own past. Describing the inspiration of a mix he curated in 2014, Ray mentioned his fascination with a “paranoid, summer-y feeling that something familiar isn’t as familiar as it looks at first glance.” Though his sizable discography has often mined regret and retrospection, Talk to You Soon is the most severe account of an emotional haunting. It explores the idea of how personal upheaval perverts both memory and the comfort of nostalgia.
There is a strange paradox about the way we remember things. As Israeli neuroscientist Yadin Dudai explained it on a 2007 episode of Radiolab: “If you have a memory, the more you use it, the more likely you are to change it. So, if you never use your memory, it is secured.” Such is the way that Ray explores this fixation of the past. On several songs, lyrics are cast as repeated chants that assume different meanings from their first utterance to their final. Where “Nice to See You” transforms from robotic to sincere with its eponymous phrase, “This Is as Close to Heaven as I Get” degrades from blissful to sinister over the course of a dozen repetitions of the song’s titular statement. The beautiful, far-too-short midpoint of the record, “Know,” interpolates the unfinished clause “Before I know you” into various phrases, including the forlorn “It seems to me, that you’d be happier/Before I know you.” By playing with these repetitions, *Talk to You Soon *asks at what point does gazing inward turn from self-reflection to distortion.
While Ray’s previous Ricky LP, Three Love Songs, was an ambient record indebted to the KLF’s warped field recordings, Talk to You Soon feels more like impressionistic vignettes about the disparate feelings born out of trauma. From the moment the swirls of “‘hey’” introduce a dizzying volatility, complete with string arrangements from Owen Pallett, there is a nagging sense of discord. It’s the sonic equivalent of when someone says, “Hi, how are you?” and you say “Good!” even though you are moments from a nervous breakdown. The rest of the album roils on from there, and even if we are temporarily distracted by IDM-indebted beats or palliative synth glows, anxiety always looms in the margins.
Ray’s piano playing has much to do with *Talk to You Soon’s *unraveling nerves. On “Spinning About Under the Bright Light in Bliss,” a gentle swell abruptly turns to percussive jabs. The underlying progression remains, but it is beleaguered by shrill notes as though Ray’s left and right hands are at war. “In the Grocery Store,” with its spectral melody, sounds impossibly distant from its mundane namesake and more akin to the title theme of The Exorcist. It’s these discrepancies that remind us that the world inside your head and the one you inhabit can be so unaware of each other. It doesn’t matter if you are in a supermarket, or fucking, or even having a good day—your mind can rebel at any moment.
The closest Talk to You Soon comes to a complete psychotic break is the anarchic “As We Speak,” which features abrasive screaming from LA-based post-metal outfit Wreck and Reference. Unlike the unnerving electronics that whirred before, this track is a melting point of hoarse howling, crashing drums, and the wailing of an alarm siren. The acute panic attack lasts for a minute before yielding to an adrenalized heartbeat and veering into nervous percussive twitches. This moment is so abrasive, so intense, that the remainder of the album feels exhausted from its own introspection.
Though maybe that’s the point Ray is trying to make here. Nominally, the final two tracks, “On a Good Day” and “‘ok’,” suggest that perhaps we have finally reached some calm after emotional tumult, but their languor recalls the dreary effects of overthinking. Can there be any respite for someone who lives so thoroughly inside their own mind, who is prone to over-analyzing and distorting the past? Although Ricky Eat Acid excels in making supernaturally empathetic music, these final moments of Talk to You Soon are especially isolating, a final warning to the listener that when gazing inward becomes pathological, it casts an endless pall.
