Emma Ruth Rundle has released a new EP Orpheus Looking Back, a small collection of unreleased songs from the Engine Of Hell sessions, her highly lauded 2021 album. These three bare and intimate performances are in keeping with the album's unadorned style. “Pump Organ Song”, released earlier this month was written spontaneously in the studio in response to her failing marriage and the availability of an old pump organ in the tracking room. Of the other two songs Rundle notes:
“Saint Non” was written in Wales after visiting the eponymous well, chapel and spring at Saint David in Pembrokeshire - the song was the only lyrical contender for EG2 but made more sense on EOH - originally was sequenced as the album closer but I struck it from the record entirely at the last minute, finding In My Afterlife a more appropo final stop on the journey. Despite my feeling that it is a special song, it didn't belong on EOH...and then there is “Gilded Cage”, a song I wrote in Berlin a number of years ago and have loved to play live because of its energy - it was also an outlier and couldn't make the cut but deserved to live beyond the live show somehow.”
Engine of Hell, released in November of 2021, is a stark, intimate and unflinching look at trauma and grief. The album focused on a return to the piano, an instrument she left behind in her early twenties. The Engine of Hell recording sessions took place in Stinson Beach in December 2020, with Sonny DePerri co-producing/engineering.
Stream / Download: https://ffm.to/err-olb