When the Singing Ended and We Turned
Wallace Stevens, Pale Ramon, and the Dissonance of Life and Music
It was a chance meeting that brought the Brooklyn-based Kevin Plessner (Oceanographer / Monuments) and Emanuel Ayvas (Emanuel and the Fear) together in 2015. After that initial meeting, the two met weekly to chat and create music.
“It’s was a welcoming and immersive process,” stated Plessner.
“It’s a conversation between the two of us. That’s how it all kind of happens, and I’d say the playing is that way. You know those people you just have an easy time speaking with, everything about it is stemming from that kind of core chemistry,” explained Ayvas.
That chemistry assisted in the creation of an album worth of material within a month, and laid the foundation for the band Pale Ramon.
Pale Ramon would bring their tracks to Vibromonk Studios in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on November 15, 2018. Instead of solely recording the music, the duo and their band, comprised at that time of Grant Zubritsky (Nick Murphy f.k.a. Chet Faker / Maggie Rogers / Verite), Justin Hofmann (Are There Jungles/ Johnny V Lewis), and David Lizmi (MsMr / Innov Gnawa), shot a 35 minute YouTube Exclusive video. The choice for this was to capture the musical fruits of their creative labors, but also to ensure new audiences understood the work behind the music was authentic, free of studio tricks.
Once the tracks had been played in a band setting and the initial video was posted to the internet, the group followed up in 2019 with an official studio-recorded release of the collection as a self-titled EP.
The name Pale Ramon is taken from the poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens. Stevens, a lawyer turned poet, captures in this work an idea of dissonance between reality and perception. The poem evaluates music as a mode of life reflection that opens to each of us individually.
Both poetry and dissonance are at the heart of the musical effectiveness of Pale Ramon. While the band has influences that shape songwriting, there is enough creative room for the listener to go on a personal journey with their own meaning.
“We don’t want to force our thoughts on anyone ever,” said Ayvas. “I don’t ever want to talk about what I think, I just want to look at it and reflect it back because this is a really amazing time and it doesn’t matter what your opinion is on anything. It’s just amazing to see what’s happening now, it’s like a communication pivot where everything is shifting to another way of talking and behaving. I think it’s a really exciting for making anything.”
Like Stevens, the beauty of Pale Ramon is their ability to provide a complex, poetic, musical experience. While the track-listing may be the same, each recorded version from the band provide a different sonic experience. The Vibromonk Session, which was released as an album on August 20, 2021, contains all of the exciting raw power of a group finding its musical legs. It’s intimate, pure, and undaunted. The studio release has an edgier, ethereal feel utilizing phone recordings, instrumentals, and synths to deepen the listening experience.
In 2020, Pale Ramon began work on their sophomore album “Annie”. Due to the challenges of the pandemic, completion and release were delayed. With the onset of 2021, the grip of COVID dissipated and provided enough space for the band to regroup and release the album on October 15, 2021.
The ghost of Stevens still haunts this album. His thumbprint is most obvious through the title of the track “The Idea of Order”. To a lesser extent, however, is the context of the musician as artist and the lessons they teach us about others and ourselves.
Oh, that’s the world I see.
Everyone smiles at me
But I’ll never smile, not me,
My face, it will not crumble.
Let the needle freeze the years from me
So I look younger.
For the life I need, I’ll Pay For Me to look like me.
For the uninitiated, the release of “Annie” marks a perfect time to dive into the work of Pale Ramon. It is rare to find a band where the music fits as seamlessly into a classroom discussion as it does on any notable channel on the radio. They are part musician, part poet-philosopher cutting a musical swathe to our social and political psyches that stays with you long after the song fades away.
