Eddie Ruscha V / Secret Circuit

E Ruscha V / Secret Circuit (née Edward Joseph Ruscha V), a sometimes sage known and beloved throughout the Los Angeles creative community. With a core psychedelic aesthetic, it’s a band composed of one basic member and various guests, where free music was expressed. It’s music that channels the cosmic, jam-disco, soul, funk and jazz.

Who Are You is the first full-length release by Eddie Ruscha under his given name since donning the Secret Circuit guise in 2010 to administer an electronic antidote to the psychedelic / shoegaze dirge that dominated his formative music-making. Between Secret Circuit’s two 12” EPs and a colossal full length, Tactile Galactics, on Beats In Space in 2013 and now, Ruscha has remained wildly prolific producing unfathomable four-on-the-floor formulas for the best and brightest labels outside of Space.

The Secret Circuit hiatus suggests a return to self and an unmasked, untethered musical language, an approach Ruscha describes as “exploring melody that can mutate as different shades of beauty.” Rhythm plays a supporting role on Who Are You, an album with less concern over club constrictions and more contemplation of open, unbound spaces, areas in which Ruscha sees the music capturing “the feeling of a lost day.”

Who Are You further pares down the dub, tropicalia, and Afro / cosmic influences that have historically placed Secret Circuit at the dance music fringe, repurposing them as concerted instrumentals whose melodic themes are so lyrical they appear song-like, expressive without words. Brought to mind are similar instrumentalists such as Vini Reilly, Wally Badarou, Mark and Clive Ives of Woo, and contemporaries such as Gaussian Curve and Suzanne Kraft, a collaborator of Eddie’s.