Photo by Lisa Vironda
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Ryland Bouchard is a musician, cinematographer, and recording engineer located in Ashfield, MA.
Currently working on a full length non-narrative nature documentary using 16mm film. For additional information about licensing or booking please feel free reach out via email.
One of the most creative and potentially scary (though you'd never know it) minds of our generation. Big words, sure, but any of the scenarios that Bouchard has built any of these songs out of would be the pride of any great novelist and he's got them queued up for miles.
Songs with the sounds of an old transistor radio, crackling gramophones, a music box, and a fragile and touching voice - like that of a doll that you left too long among the dust and forgot about. Calm and vaporous...Timid and ethereal.
People demand a degree of continuity from bands. Gradual artistic evolution is encouraged over the course of a long career, but constant reinvention as an aesthetic mode is accepted only in a few canonized chameleons like David Bowie, and even then only after a period of introductory stability. So it's not surprising that instinctive changeling Ryland Bouchard - who crammed a David Byrne's worth of sincere musical metamorphosis into five years and four albums as the Robot Ate Me before abruptly retiring the name in 2007 - has confounded critics and fans alike...His most forthrightly personal record to date, explores the growth and decay of interpersonal relationships over SEEDS' four installments and a variety of folk forms, recalling Randy Newman, Jeff Mangum, Nick Drake, and, yes, even the Robot Ate Me. Even on intimate, bare songs like gorgeous album highlight "Bye Bye Love #3," the steady woodwinds that discordantly put the surprisingly short song to bed remind us that a songwriter as strong as Bouchard retains his distinctive and lovely compositional voice regardless of the tradition in which he is working.
Selected discography: |
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© Ryland Bouchard 2022
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