It was bound to happen. Those millennials we all feel crawling up our backs late at night will turn out to be the new musicians of this world. To call them musicians is a rather generous gesture on my part, for if you happen to come across Gryphon Rue, you just might wonder how something so half-baked, pretentious, and utterly devoid of any sonic interest whatsoever could be assembled and released to an unwitting public. 

A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers is a disparate rag bag of synth-driven compositions, which place you in a field of hastily sketched figures who have appeared in more felicitous light erstwhile and elsewhere. The ingredients are by now old hat – synth, a custom patch or two, random field recording, an acoustic instrument thrown in for good measure – though that has done nothing to halt the barrage of simplemindedness that spews from this rusty faucet.

I’ll try to be more specific. Good music, whatever it is and in whichever self-anointed genre, is a product of depth, regardless of how surface level the results may sound. It is jarring and altogether objectionable how Rue begins something and never brings it anywhere, never offers even a modicum of absorption, and instead moves on to the next idea – swipe in whichever direction you like – and leaves you with one lasting image: someone trying to do something. The intentionality in making music stays just that: intentional. There is no rhyme or reason why any of the sounds exist, no connection to a broader horizon of sonic potential, and the mishmash results in a distracted feed of empty ciphers of some original, whatever that may be.