Dylan Ryan - In The Same Room With A Cactus

The songs for “In The Same Room With A Cactus” originated in Dylan Ryan’s Los Feliz apartment during the Summer of 2022. After spending much of the spring on tour drumming with experimental rockers, Man Man, he began sketching ideas for something initially intended to be a new recording with his fusion trio, SAND. From his kitchen table studio looking out onto Franklin Ave, Ryan cobbled together a handful of pieces that evolved into “In The Same Room With A Cactus.”

Presented with a unique writing environment, beside a window essentially at street level, Ryan embraced these surroundings and allowed them to inspire the writing process. “I started acknowledging my blurring senses of invention and reality pertaining to these faces, briefly - but regularly - entering and exiting my window frame like theatre." Leaving the blank space - the unknown parts - became somewhat of a unifying compositional tool and the notion of encouraging the listener's ear to wander where it wants, the album’s thematic golden thread. With this in mind, the songs on “In The Same Room With A Cactus” play with overlapping swaths of instrumentations blurring any concrete, established rhythm. “I wanted to have that element of the unfamiliar familiar in these pieces. The way that everyday the same sun hits the earth with different light in a different way.”

According to Ryan the location provided an inspiring “consistency of flux”. “A strange and subtle sense of acquaintanceship with the passers by emerged as I drafted this music. There is a Paul Auster quote from Smoke that I thought of. 'Sometimes the different [people] become the same, and the same ones disappear.’ More linear in nature than much of the music Ryan has penned previously, these songs evolve slowly, paving for the listener paths that blur the senses of known and concealed; real and imagined.

...about Ryan...

Dylan Ryan has drummed with groups such as Red Krayola, Cursive, and Icy Demons while maintaining ties to the experimental community, frequenting the bandstand and recording studio alongside artists such as Bitchin Bajas, Jeff Parker, Patrick Shiroishi, Daniel Carter, Jeremiah Chiu, Sam Gendel, Jason Stein and Devra Hoff, and releasing two albums under his name on the Cuneiform Records imprint. He has performed at the New York Winter Jazz Fest, Massey Hall, Pritzker Pavillon, REDCAT Theatre, David Lynch's Silencio, and the Getty Center.

Ryan has been featured twice in works by the fine artist Doug Aitken; ‘Black Mirror’, a multi form video installation projected on a barge off the island of Hydra, and the New York Times Style Magazine’s documentation of Aitken’s home as a musical experience in ‘acid modernism’.