Christensen, Stefan

***"The Ruby double 7” was made in loving commemoration of Carl Robert Talbot who was murdered by corrections officers inside the Whalley Avenue jail in New Haven, CT on March 21, 2019 around 7AM. Rob was a magnificently special person, which anyone who knew him knew plainly as fact. The conditions that he was forced to live under and the circumstances in which he died speak volumes to the degradation and humiliation all of us must endure in our current state of affairs. I wish I could say that this record is a celebration of Rob's life but that would be a lie; it is full of heartache, suffering, bitterness and hostility towards a system that dehumanizes even the gentlest among us. Ruby was culled together over a few months entirely from initially improvised tracks made on a variety of second rate guitars—a cheap plastic parlor guitar, a broken banjo, an upside down Strat and the Cowboy Guitar. Most of the rest of the instruments and amplifiers used in overdubbing were thrift store finds and roadside junk. It seemed the only way to honor a man who lived a life almost entirely pieced together from the odds and ends the rest of us left behind. Though the recording process was mostly filled with sadness, a bit of joy peeked in every now and again. At times it seemed like every time I worked another marvelous oddity would occur—an unintended yet wonderful sound would find its way to the tape, never to be repeated, never sure how I stumbled upon it in the first place. In the case of “Stark Blue” I still have no idea where the percussive sound came from—one day I was working on guitar tracks, the next, track 3 had an amazingly off-kilter sizzle, pulsing with life. If I were a spiritual man I might say these sounds were Rob stopping by to help out, but, as it is, I’ll just be satisfied to say that they are the happiest of accidents. The artwork was made entirely from xerox manipulated photographs of Rob, which were then silk screened by Ryan Kalentkowski and finally hand-cut and assembled by me. The double 7” format was chosen because of its perfect absurdity; a description that seems tailor made for Rob himself. And so, I hope that I have created something that is stark in its reality, something that is beautiful in its sound and presentation, but most of all something that celebrates Rob in spite of itself. Rest well, Ruby. Fuck the DOC and all that works to maintain it."—Stefan Christensen