I had a great time last Saturday night, January 11, catching a live performance by Cecyl Ruehlen and Chelsey Lee Trejo at the Crown in Oakland. I’d previously reviewed, for The Wire, a fantastic performance that Ruehlen was part of at the Luggage Store Gallery back in July 2023. It says something about the impression that concert made on me that I would swear it happened last year, not the year prior. He evidenced an incredible capacity to push the horn and the synth against each other. Usually when I witness acoustic instruments in an arrangement with synthesizers, the latter is processing the former, but what he was up to was more partnership, even confrontation.
Ruehlen, who lives in Arizona, as does Trejo, let me know in advance that they would passing through the Bay Area and performing here twice. He also warned me there was “no saxophone” in this show, because he knew it was his use of a sax in the context of a modular synthesizer that had so impressed me a year and a half or so earlier.
This set at the Crown was full-on drone, the sounds of his and Trejo’s instruments given extra roominess thanks to the space’s expansive and impressive green tile. Trejo played synth and bowed instruments of her own invention. Also handmade was Ruehlen’s remarkable six-guitar set-up, with one string on each guitar, and each with its own volume pedal, eBow (to sustain notes), and weights (to tune the strings).
You can get a sense of the the music from a recent album, Texture of Light, by the duo, though note the instrumentation on this is far more wide-ranging, including bass clarinet and, yes, saxophone:
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