It was the Carter administration, a time of free thinking and democracy, a time of recreational drugs, big collars, tight pants and free love. Unreasonably romantic times. Simple times. Winter actually existed in those days and on particularly frigid day in February, as the ink was still drying on the marriage license, a groundhog saw his shadow and a couple of mixed heritage in California’s bay area saw their first born. A spirited lad full of affection, drool, and bad manners, Ryan Flores became what is known today as a ’problem child’ whose ’A.D.D.’ required ’special needs’. After a decade of riding skateboards, listening to punk rock, and skipping school Ryan finally found something to sustain his interest and passion: girls -and a tattered nylon string guitar. The latter of the two being the primary focus here.______________ Ryan began torturing his college roommate with overly sentimental, insanely repetitive songs that perfectly illustrated his lack of experience. After a few years (and more than a few roommates) he began recording his own material. Nowadays he lives in his own world of hopeless idealism and organic food; his deeply revealing poetry, stories, and songs bridging the gap of inner subjectivity to the bizarre and counter-intuitive flow of main-stream culture. Ryan’s music, especially, has an existential quality that fully realizes its own inability to supply answers to any of its own questions, not unlike a religion. His music, at best, helps the listener feel more connected and empathetic toward the human condition and, at worst, more comfortable with embracing the paradoxes of life and love. It doens’t sound too bad either.______________“The Ridgehouse Recordings" offers thirteen original songs written and produced by the artist. The material makes for good driving music. A record you wouldn’t mind going insane to, really. Ryan’s contrastingly rich inner world is on display here, clad in bells and whistles of poetic vulnerability and stripped down self-realization. The mostly sunny with scattered showers lyrics are delivered with a sense of insecure glory that defeats the swarthy demons of introspection with wily riddles and terse expressions. "The Ridgehouse Recordings" is the musical equivalent of an errant circus clown giving himself a heart transplant without anesthesia.__________"Flores Para La Luna" is the title of Ryan’s second album. It is a sonic exploration into Spanish Folk and gypsy music that leaves the listener feeling as if they had traveled back in time, back to simpler times, times of passion and intrigue, sagacious times, times of minstrels and merriment, times of body odor and strange clothes, sultry times, unreasonably romantic times, pre-post-modern quasi-existential times, times before the turbid onset of western hegemony, times that didn’t make sense, like present times; but there’s no time like the present.
The time is now.____________"Flores En Ondas" will be the title of the third album. Twelve of the eighteen (or so) tracks for this record are already written, and affecting so much joy and passion in their creator that he can hardly even bring himself to boast about them. This record is going to be a sonic tidal wave, a sensuous dynamo, a voluptuous beam of --at any rate, recording will begin this spring; actually, after the songs are written and a location chosen for a conjugal visit with the guitar -only under the scrupulous supervision of a condenser microphone of course.So, tell your friends there’s a new wounded healer in town who has no idea what to expect of himself.
She sways to the song I sing for her inside my head,
and knows nothing of this child in me
who carries her books in a parallel universe,
where I am filled with butterflies and she with a perfect love
of these imperfect love songs written just for her with hand grenade precision my lips form clumsy sentences as her name hides under my tongue can she find me in this hologram when she is blind to all my beckoning? My lighthouse shines from rocky shore. Please find me I am waiting here trapped inside this hourglass but the sun is peaking in at last, still the sand it pours down like rain as she dances on the spaces
between my broken heartbeats
with slender hands and supple lips that keep my mind wandering
and wondering if those spaces between us will ever diminish?
copyright 2005 Ryan Flores Music
