Garbus, Ruth

***Ruth Garbus’s Alive People is a studio album full of underground anthems for sensitive people of all ages that happened to be recorded in a club with an audience of a hundred. In between the compositions are interstitial improvisations that happened on stage during the performance. These are not presented in sequence. It’s not a lesser copy of a moving experience. It’s an echoing recreation, traveling- out photons bent thru and into a pastel rainbow. Ruth was joined on stage at different points by collaborators: elie mcafee-hahn on synth and bass, Julie Bodian on atypical guitars, Julia Tadlock on voice and presence. Nick Bisceglia engineered, with Ruth’s two vocal mics taped together, the room split to its mid and sides, the pop filter a matte circle in front of the shimmering curtain.