it’s been years since i’ve gotten a release from ronnie martin on release date (the last one was the covers album from 2009.) i missed the 2012 kickstarter because it was just a bad time for me financially, and i hadn’t made the effort to purchase any of the said fantasy stuff, instead relying on streaming for those selections. so when ronnie’s new record “from the womb of the morning the dew of your youth will be yours” was announced last year, i was immediately on board.
set to release on january 28th, 2022, you can only imagine my surprise and joy when the mailman left a record shaped parcel on the doorstep this morning. after listening a few times, i have to say that anything he releases, to me, just fits like a glove. his music is like coming home on holidays and being able to once again indulge in grandma’s pumpkin pie. it just feels right.
now that’s not to say that he is retreading old ground here, quite the contrary. there are fully arranged percussion, which i’ve never heard that before in his work. and from images showing his workshop on social media, he is using a pc, with i’m assuming is protools. which is a hard deviation from the joy electric material. but regardless of the circumstances of the recording, it still feels patently ronnie martin.
"adrift on the brink of a shivery winter rink foxes flee in spades low glance undressed, mysteries woeful, unconfessed You might hear the means of a melody that will tease the seams of threads unwoven" -Snow Like Wool
that is instantly made clear when you hear the lyrics, which to me takes elements from what he was doing on the otherly opus, the white songbook, and we are the music makers and pushing those ideas even further in new directions. the record definitely has a familiar feel to it at moments when you feel like there’s a subtle callback to these eras, but also so much of the record is brand new ground technically and from a production standpoint.
for this record he used a moog one polyphonic synthesizer, a moog dfam, moog mother-32, moog minitaur, among various moogerfooger and other effects pedals. which is quite a detraction from the legacy series where the entire record was made with a roland system 100, or a minimoog voyager. He took what he started with dwarf mountain of having lush chords and what not beneath the music and taking it a step further in this release. the tracks definitely sound much fuller, and its nice to be able to finally hear that in his work. i can not overstate how cool it is to hear such definite percussion and drums on these tracks. i was never a fan of him insisting on using live drummers at shows back in the day, but this on the other hand, is exactly what the dr. ordered.
the record comes in with 7 tracks clocking in at just over 30 minutes of playtime. it’s a very easy listen, as it doesn’t require as much of your time as, say white song book. for that it makes it easier to listen to with commutes to work, as i prefer to listen to an entire album in my commute, which is about 15 minutes each way. so this record is perfect in that regard.
‘from the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours’ is available on January 28, 2022 at all major streaming platforms, and is also available in physical format from velvet blue music on vinyl, audio cassette, and compact disc (as of the time of this publishing.)
-keith