In 2006, David Moore started Bing & Ruth as a way to bring his compositions to an audience beyond academia. A pianist from Kansas, studying at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York’s Greenwich Village, Moore was writing the sort of music he wanted to hear: minimalist ensemble music with a certain filmic sensitivity, one that prioritized grace and texture over the style’s once-radical subtraction.
Following the seasoned history of minimalist heroes at the New School like John Cage and Steve Reich—both of whom taught at the institution throughout the 1950s and ‘60s—Moore’s compositions looked past the studied repetition of the style’s most prominent forerunners towards a form built on feeling, a mobilization of time-honored shapes, now angled outward towards a greater totalizing sublime. The piece’s mark the culmination of Moore’s piano studies, pairing tender lines that emphasize the instrument’s more percussive qualities with running woodwinds, warbling tape delays, and splattered upright bass lines that stare out with a wide-eyed transcendence.
After a short hiatus, spent focused on other projects, Moore returned to Bing & Ruth in 2010 with City Lake. The ensemble had grown to eleven members, making touring and rehearsals increasingly difficult to coordinate, especially given the current landscape of classical music, which can make finding patronage outside of a few prodigious, metropolitan institutions a task that often seems insurmountable. Instead, he sold self-released vinyl from his basement and at their shows around New York. As Moore continued, despite constant setbacks and frustrations, in his early sketches of new material, it seemed that the project would soon fade into obscurity. Around this time, Moore was put in touch with the experimental label RVNG INTL. and the pair worked together on two full-length LPs over the coming years.
Of these albums, 2014’s Tomorrow Was the Golden Age parsed the group’s eleven members to a seven-person ensemble that distilled minimalism’s most emotive moments down to artful melodies with a heavy, heartbreaking affect. The album brought the band a newfound acclaim as it made waves around the underground community, reviving interest in the meditative pop traditions of Philip Glass and Harold Budd, stretching so-called “classical” music to new limits, and proving that there was in fact a committed audience for this sort of thoughtful contemporary composition. The album was even named “one of the finest leftfield releases of the year” by Pitchfork and earned similar praise from The Quietus and Resident Advisor.
Bing & Ruth's 2017 album, No Home of the Mind, found Moore returning to the piano a heavier, more driven feeling. Composed on seventeen pianos across North America and Europe over numerous sessions, tours, and travel, the pieces channel the idiosyncrasies and respective limitations of each instrument into inspiration.
The group’s fourth studio album, the 7-track, 49-minute Species, was released on July 17, 2020.
While on a surface level, Species is an exploration of the sonic possibilities of the Farfisa organ, aided only by a clarinet and double bass (played respectively by founding members Jeremy Viner and Jeff Ratner), it was inspired by two recent loves of Moore’s: the desert and long-distance running. Briefly relocating from his New York base to Point Dume, between the Pacific Ocean and the desert, Moore was able to indulge in both passions, which in turn provided stimulus for new work.
Species is a study of suspended time and trance; not just a steady movement from A to B, but as something that flows, meanders, and eddies, like water. Moore says, “I’d found myself in places unfamiliar enough that I could easily lose all sense of direction, size and, more than anything, all sense of time. The music I was making became a kind of reflection of these intentional detachments - and a place to mirror that feeling of trance that had pushed them out in the first place.”
