CLEANING OUT THE EMPTY ADMINISTRATION BUILDING | VINYL RECORD (LP)

R.J.F., 'Cleaning Out The Empty Administration Building' is Ross Farrar's latest offering of raw, spoken word abstraction and experimental sound design, presented here as R.J.F. The front man for American bands Ceremony and SPICE realized his solo recording project initially as a challenge, to write songs from the ground up, learning the instrumentation and excavating his subconscious in the process. The point was not fluency in musicianship as much as vulnerability; to pull something honest from a moment, unguarded, unpolished, unapologetically amateur and pure. The collection finds Farrar engaged in open-ended poetic dialogue, crossing drum patterns and found sounds with stabs of guitar, bass, and keys. After over twenty years in the comfort and chaos of collaboration, Farrar sheds it all as a test. The results are distinctive and stirring. Farrar's punk pathos is present in traces of Cleaning, while his clearest cues come from music built more through repetition: drone, no-wave, Avant-jazz, and beyond. His plainspoken prose nods to Lou Reed, Rowland S. Howard and other weirdo greats. His lyrics riff on love, addiction, fatherhood, and life in the modern world. "I wanted to make images that people can see clearly," he says. Farrar used to teach writing and literature, and here he applies the simple principle he encouraged his students to follow: don't overthink it. "I was just saying to myself, these songs should be fun. They shouldn't be stressful. Do a couple of different takes and call it, you know, don't obsess over the sounds of everything. Do whatever comes out naturally, and if you feel it, then print it." Selected from hundreds of freeform songs he's recorded on borrowed gear in recent years, the album presented itself over time. "It just kept coming." 'Cleaning's tone has a way of bending time, displacing the listener through a hall of songs, each opening a different door into rooms that often feel eerily familiar. The gurgling bass of opener "Advance" returns elsewhere, haunting tracks like "Ovidian," a reference to Metamorphōsēs by the Roman poet Ovid, where Farrar waxes on the wonder of change over distant chimes. Instrumentals "Gravity Hill," a flutter of buzzing synth and static, and "Frogs," all strums and pots n' pans percussion, serve as trance-inducing interstitials, adding to the power of the prose that surrounds. "Exile" looks back on fallouts he can no longer repair; "So much of your heart caught in my exile," he sings with tender resignation, looping a lone piano refrain with ambling guitar chords for the collection's most structured arrangement, a reminder of Farrar's knack for melodic phrasings. The album ends on "Traveling Light From Afar," a full step faster than anything that precedes it. Here, over a backbone of motorik pulses, Farrar addresses the crux of the project head-on. "I've been so young in my old age / Selfish & self-pitying / But that's just narcissism-man." It is this balance, between gritty self-interrogation and the clarity of self-awareness that comes with getting older, that the artist can make space for progress, emptying out the building, one line at a time.