Ricky Eat Acid: Facing Nostalgia Head-On

At 22, Sam Ray is trying to circumvent nostalgia. It’s not that he’s ignoring it, so much as figuring out ways to use it without falling victim to it. There’s something honorable about that, considering nostalgia is ultimately a form of comfort, and depending on your background and age, has been a musical crutch for a staggering number of artists in recent years.

In 2009 and 2010, when Ray was a teenager, a lot of music presented an idealized version of a certain type of modern childhood: sun-dappled, carefree days and an obsession with largely nonexistent innocence as portrayed by blurry synths and goopy, off-kilter drums. In short, there wasn’t too much there there. “I feel like nostalgia is a trap, but it’s not a bad one,” Ray says. “God knows, chillwave came up…when I first heard all those artists, everyone was like, ‘Oh this is awesome.’ [But] I think mining nostalgia as the sole point of music or art is really limiting. It’s really shallow, in a way. There’s a way to use memory and nostalgia and the feeling behind nostalgia – a bittersweet thing. Looking at the past through a very filtered lens, seeing it the way you want… it’s really good groundwork for music or whatever you want to do.”

Ray’s Ricky Eat Acid project faces this sort of nostalgia head on, drawing on his adolescence in suburban Maryland through largely ambient compositions that mix manipulated field recordings with twee electronic blips that expand and refract into thick, engaging, darkly textured moments. It’s an open sound that pairs Ray’s specific song titles (“Outside your house; the lights went out & there was nothing,” “Driving alone past roadwork at night”) with impressionistic, often abstract music.

Even the project’s origin story manages to be unique, but still draws on universal themes: boredom, feeling trapped in the place you grew up, giddy experimentation. Ricky Eat Acid took shape when Ray was bored with his best friend Ricky at a house party in those purgatorial days between the end of high school and everything that comes after. Ricky got the chance to take acid for the first time for free, and asked Ray to drive his car around while he did it. “We went to my house to drop my car off and I left my mom a note. We’d just graduated high school and I knew she wouldn’t care,” Ray explains. “I hastily wrote down Ricky Eat Acid. I couldn’t form a sentence because we were rushing about. She laughed at me about it.”

Since then, he’s amassed a daunting collection of music that fits the wide-open, druggy vibe of the name he chose. Mostly available for free online, it ranges from beat sketches to flickering drones; from solemn piano treatments, to ecstatic, charmingly rough bedroom house. It’s often very pretty, but also unsettling.

The best place to start is with his most recent album, Three Love Songs, which grapples with life change, both large and small. “Part of the experience of writing this record was trying not to take things for granted,” Ray says. “I’ve always had a life where people move in and out, but they always come back. Now I’m realizing they aren’t going to come back and forth forever. I’m not saying [Three Love Songs] is 100% focused on loss, but it’s about appreciating what you have. It relates to that sense of nostalgia vs. memory. Nostalgia, to me, is much more evocative of all the good times. This is more in line with the idea of not just idealizing people and the past. It’s taking it all as it is.”

Ray is working within the parameters already set by Aphex Twin or Tim Hecker: ambient music that is evocative of emotion, without getting into too much detail about specific events. Like those artists, his music is brooding, but not unrelentingly so. “Driving alone past roadwork at night” is built on layered mechanical chirps that sound bubbly, until they eventually tangle and fade into swirling white noise. It’s a startling moment of contrast, and one that Ray returns to throughout the album, moving from slackened drifts of noise to, unexpectedly, a few ecstatic minutes of sloppy house at the midpoint of the album. Even the dissonant moments sound nice on the surface. But pull back a few layers and you’ll hear a lurking fear of the unknown.

Though Ray is preoccupied with change and how to cope (or not) with friends moving away, with his home becoming unrecognizable, with death, he uses Ricky Eat Acid as a way to be a passive observer in his own life, creating elliptical tracks that work as a series of loose abstractions that bleed into each other messily, eventually adding up to an exploration of the fragmented way that memory works.

“There’s a good side of nostalgia – making something that can bring out whatever people want to bring out, but being aware of that.” he says. “Writing something that can draw you back to a certain time, but knowing it’s not exactly as you’re seeing it. There’s something under it. I described the album as emptiness that has something lurking within it. Looking at a memory is empty, people you don’t know are filtered out. There’s a scene and you’re making it the way you want. I picture rivers from my childhood and I take power lines and houses and cars out and am like, ‘Man, that was a beautiful place.’ Knowing there is something heavier at play always makes for a richer experience. So much of my music before was an exorcism of good and bad times I’ve had in my life. I was like, ‘Alright, let’s move past that and do something new.’”