Rumspringa — ear

Rumspringa — ear

Rumspringa, the sophomore effort from New York/London electronic duo ear, spans 10 tracks and just over 30 minutes. But in that time, it manages to establish a vivid picture— albeit one obscured through its thorough lo-fi aesthetic and universally subdued approach.

It’s a project that, from start to finish, invites imagination. The vocals are barely audible, and the pronounced vocal samples and field recordings don’t necessarily string together into a coherent narrative throughline. Rumspringa is deeply tactile, however. As the listener moves from track to track, they’re summoned into a wavering sonic sphere, and the album’s space, its openness, calls the listener to supply their own images; their own themes string together the work’s component parts.

Didacticism is not mutually exclusive with beauty. But it is often these types of works, those with the space for the audience to inject themselves into their world, that hold the greatest capacity for reflection. Rumspringa is one of those works.

Rumspringa feels like you’re laying at the bottom of a hill, covered in the dew of the early morning and gazing up at a fading night sky. You might be rolling off the lingering tendrils of a psychedelic trip, or it might simply feel that way in the enthrallment of it all. But in the dawn-studded grass and the rapidly dimming stars, you can sense a vague connectedness— there is peace, yet an abiding unease in our imagined meadow.

Tracks like “Threads”, in its soft, hallowed wind blowing through its open fields, construct the atmosphere. So do the unobtrusive title track “Rumspringa” and the twinkling, scattered “Water and Power”.

But the true punch of the album lies in tracks like “Ne Plus Ultra”. These are what construct the environment, the dewy grass field in which you lay, trapped somewhere between the coldness of the earth below your back and the hazy warmth of the rising sun above.

“Ne Plus Ultra”, for its part, returns to many of the motifs of the opener, “Coil”, but it is the most distinctly electronic track on the album, tracing out soaring lead lines and rutting bass riffs that supersede its acoustic exterior. “F” accomplishes the same goal through different means. The most dissonant track on the album, its industrial textures are juxtaposed with moments of inescapable serenity.

Rumspringa, in fact, is a venture of juxtaposition: just not in the usual sonic sense, where contrasting elements (especially of differing genres) are fused together to create a consciously jarring effect. Rumspringa is far from jarring in the traditional sense.

ear is unique in its ability to blend its disparate elements with a perfect sense of ease, without resorting to pastiche or using their electronic experimentations merely as ear candy. Rumspringa possesses the gentle boldness of Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs without any of the pretence—the same warm glow as Oracular Spectacular without any of the self-derisive irony.

It is soft. It is gentle, and it is utterly entrancing.

And if it takes the injection of the listener’s own mental image to get there, so be it.