ARAN RUTH

Each night, as it passes from its waking state into the sleep-and-dream state, the brain spends some time in the alpha wave frequency. During this brief pit stop before sliding into actual sleep, the consciousness is momentarily bombarded by a rapid-fire barrage of vivid imagery and dream snippets. Boundaries of time and space collapse, and sprawling epics are sketched out in the span of a few breaths.The black magic space folk of Aran Ruth seems to emanate from that same alpha wave ether; beamed to us, one reckons, by a phantom network of invisible AM radio towers. Her first debut appearance was Fright Night, an offering on Bellyache Records' Ghoul's Delight compilation for Hallowe'en 2007. Fantasy and storytelling have long been staples of acoustic music, and Ruth's songs certainly revolve on that axis.But while Ruth's looking glass reality is cohesive, it's never predictable. She teleports wildly from one otherworldly setting to the next: Here, she hesitates on the steps of a dilapidated haunted mansion, there she observes the implosion of an alien sun, while overhead, in the show-stopping (and brilliantly-titled mini-epic) "Cast Your Ship Upon Rain" a lover departs and promptly dissolves into thin air while massive galleons glide by in the stratosphere. Ruth summons an impossible world into existence, then maps it out three minutes at a time.Meanwhile, the world depicted in these songs feels distressingly unsafe. Everything is temporary in Ruth's songs; there's sunshine, but it casts tall shadows large enough to hide monsters. Voices murmur in dark cellars and there's safety in the clearing but black fuzz ogres lurk in the forest nearby. Beautiful-blue-sky melodies square off against Floydian-bad-trip storm clouds while Ruth moderates the conflict with the saucer-eyed detachment of a Martian May Queen or a lost, runaway daughter of the Manson Family.I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)