Music — Tim Ruth

Music

Releases

DS Valentin

The Speechwriters · Released on Open Room Records

The Speechwriters is the name I have used for twenty-five years for material with a slightly darker edge. Only a handful of songs have ever been released.

Tim Ruth: vocals, drums, audio and video production.

Dancer: Cloe Jackson. Guitar: Simon Brown.

Listen

New City Sphere features Victor Savorelli, 2021.

Pure Gold

OR · Album · 2021 · Released on Open Room Records

OR was a hugely rewarding project: I was invited to work with an exemplary musician and producer, who gave me the freedom to play all the unusual instruments I love.

Tim Ruth: bass, drums, marimba, mbira, kalimba, kora, vocals and production.

Jah Schmidt: guitars and production.

Listen

Techno · 2007

Spoken messages for techno, made to help reprogram the subconscious mind.

Read the story

[key] began as a response to the near absence of vocals in techno. Each loop is chosen to foster a positive mindset and an invigorating approach to life.

Techno is so often enjoyed in a meditative state, usually while dancing, so the messages are taken in through the body as much as the mind. The voice brings something organic, and the context of language, into a world that is usually abstract and purely electronic, and invites you to notice the effect on mind, body and soul.

Listen

Coming soon

Messages

[key] · Coming in 2027

New music from [key], scheduled for release in 2027.

As producer

Albums I produced for two extraordinary wordsmiths I was honoured to work with early in my music production career. Free to listen.

Inter Ference

In August 1997, at a festival in a Sussex forest, I watched a performance poet at the top of his game. When the bands finished at eleven he took the stage, and held a captivated audience until two in the morning.

Read the story

I had never heard a poet like him. His life, shaped by a painful upbringing, is a testament to the capacity of the human mind to triumph over adversity, and his insights arrive with great dignity, warmth and respect for the human experience.

He left that night with recordings that haunted him for the next couple of years, because he could find no way to share them. When our paths crossed again, I was moved to help bring them into the world as Near Life Experiences XI. A few years later we made Inessential Purchase together, building soundscapes to animate his already thrilling delivery.

I am proud and honoured to have produced both albums, and I share them here so this remarkable work can be heard more widely. I consider Inter Ference one of the greatest poets of our time. Explore his world, and be the judge.

Near Life Experiences XI

Inter Ference · recorded 1997, released 2001

The night itself: three hours of poetry, recorded live in the forest. Often joyous.

Recorded live after midnight in a Sussex forest at the Earth Spirit Summer Celebration, August 1997.

Inessential Purchase

Inter Ference · 2006

Where Near Life Experiences XI is often joyous, this is a challenging journey into the darker side of human experience. It touches difficult themes, yet it is resoundingly human, deeply empathic, and resolves triumphantly at the end. Not for the faint-hearted.

Released on musiciam. Sound: Mark Litton, Matt Skinner. Photography: Alan O’Rourke.

Marty Segal

I met Marty as a young man in Brighton. Every week he opened the Zinc Bar open mic: a peculiar, profoundly fascinating American who talked about everything and nothing, and left people wondering what had just happened.

Read the story

The Zinc Bar was packed most weeks, down in the basement of the student union bar, a room that had hosted New Order, the Sex Pistols, The Cure, The Fall and The Clash. As I got to know Marty, he turned out to be one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. He held degrees and doctorates in everything from mathematics to psychology, and was one of the American professors who gave up tenure in the 1960s, seeing it as a privilege that propped up a system that needed to fail.

He lived among artists and poets in the Paris squats of the sixties and on the London squat scene of the seventies, worked on community newspapers, hitchhiked almost everywhere and wrote a book called The Tao of Hitch-hiking (free to download as a PDF). He considered himself a spy for God, gathering all he could by starting conversations with anyone, anywhere, and he gave of himself endlessly to learning and to making the world better in a very human way.

In his last years we lived on the same street and became great friends. I saw him often and recorded him as much as I could; he had something pertinent to say on almost any subject, and an endless store of stories. When he died, the crowd that gathered to say farewell showed how deeply he had touched so many lives.

Arthur's Coming Out

Arthur Segal, read by Marty Segal · 2004

Arthur Segal's memoir of coming out in 1960s New York, found only after his death and read by his brother Marty.

Read the story

The Segals were a Jewish family from Coney Island. Their father had been a rabbi of sorts, and theirs was a household of intellectuals devoted to learning. Before Stonewall, being openly gay was something kept hidden away, and harder still for a young man from that world.

Arthur's book was discovered only after he died. Reading it, Marty learned for the first time what his brother had lived through, and that he was gay at all. He chose to narrate it himself and was deeply moved by the process: their voices were so alike that, listening back, it was as if Arthur were speaking from beyond the grave.

The story unfolds in New York just as Stonewall and the gay liberation movement were taking hold. It is beautiful, tragic and compelling: one man's private struggle, told at the birth of a movement that would spread across the world in the decades that followed.

A Spy for God

Marty Segal · 2004

After Marty died, I gathered fragments of the many recordings I had made of him into this album, a few of them set to music. A journey into the life of a man who kept learning until his dying day.

Produced by musiciam.

Marty Segal on film

Short videos