Marginals
Album released on Beacon Sound (Cassette + Digital Formats)
Description
Permeated with the burdens and joys of memory, Marginals is in part an effort by cellist Ted Laderas to process his own intense fixation with disasters and their aftermaths. At a time when one can scarcely look at the news without being immersed in one catastrophe or another, this fixation drove his interest in memorializing the victims of such disasters in an attempt to soothe his own anxiety. Thus, each track on the album references a calamity of one sort or another and is intended to be an elegy for those lost. In the face of our society’s frequent avoidance of remembering, the artist found his own solid ground in the exercise of not forgetting.
During the time in which Marginals was created, Laderas was working through his own kind of crisis: a loss of confidence that led to a period of prolonged writer’s block. Having experienced stage fright for many years, he felt like he needed to step back and recalibrate his approach to making music during the pandemic, cultivating a compositional practice and nurturing his own community of fellow musicians (indeed, he organized a weekly online mental health meet-up for similarly-minded Portland artists –“Ambient Zoom”– in 2021 and 2022). How does one transcend an unwelcome sense of competition, or fear of withering judgment, and both protect and share themselves through the twin acts of creation and sharing?
Marginals is the sound of an artist grappling gorgeously with a calamitous, sometimes-callous, world, and emerging with something of a memorial to his own disquiet.
Credits
- Ted Laderas – cello (Tracks 1,4,5,8), samples (Tracks 3,6,9,10,11), electronics
- Composed and recorded in Portland in 2020-2024
- Mastered by Simon Scott at SPS Mastering
Links
Listen
Press
Portland Mercury
One way to investigate these anxieties is through sound. Laderas’ cello has a guttural quality, as if its timbre emerges from somewhere deep in his body—Marginals’ elegies vacillate between these groans and softer sighs. Through a style Laderas calls “shoegazer cello” and “chamber drone,” layered electronics enfold acoustic gestures in a tender, if at times chilling, atmosphere. The cello remains central to Laderas’ ethos, sometimes receding or becoming unrecognizable in ambience. Several tracks feature the instrument prominently, while others lean more heavily into electronic textures, creating a pendulum effect across the record.
First Floor (Shawn Reynaldo)
The OO-Ray “Mont Blanc” (Beacon Sound)
A cellist by trade, Portland ambient explorer The OO-Ray has infused his new Marginals full-length with a certain cinematic flair—and, not surprisingly, a smattering of poignant string passages. Some of those passages appear on album highlight “Mont Blanc,” adding some extra emotional heft to the proceedings, but the song’s pensive atmosphere is more directly traceable to its soulful keys, which sound like something Brian Jackson might have played on a Gil Scott-Heron record back in the ’70s. Calling “Mont Blanc” jazzy might be a stretch, but the genre is somewhere in its DNA, adding a hint of swing to what’s otherwise a wonderfully tranquil listen.
Foxy Digitalis Interview
Marginals unfolds through the patient architecture of memory itself. Laderas’s cello traces these elegiac territories like careful cartography, sometimes drawing precise lines of sorrow, other times mapping vast territories of reflection that seem to hold entire histories within their borders. The compositions breathe with generative processes that introduce elements of chance: moments where the predetermined dissolves into something more organic, more alive to possibility. There’s a tenderness here that feels almost unbearable at times, as if each note carries the weight of all those unnamed casualties, all those stories that risk being reduced to statistics. This is music that doesn’t so much console as it acknowledges, allowing grief to exist in all its complexity without demanding resolution.
Portland Mercury
The OO-Ray / Amulets / Derek Hunter Wilson / Patricia Wolf For fans of Alex Zhang Hungtai, Labradford, Stars of the Lid
Portland-based cellist and ambient musician Ted Laderas, AKA The OO-Ray, is releasing his new album Marginals this Friday, August 15, with an accompanying release show at NEPO favorite Dream House. The album’s four available tracks are in turn chillingly sparse and megalithically maximalist, much like the disaster-fixation Laderas is trying to exorcize from himself with these songs. Marginals is being released on Portland record label Beacon Sound, with the release party’s lineup featuring OO-Ray label mates and friends. Patricia Wolf tone-sets before and between the live music, with Beacon Sound providing the post-performance sounds. All show and DJ proceeds will be donated to UndocuPDX.
A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed
Musician Ted Laderas uses his new record as The OO-Ray to process grief and loss. The pieces on Marginals are concise ruminations on those concepts, and gently experimental explorations of sound. What’s here is both austere and full of emotion.
On opener “Floe”, the cellist pierces the silence with a string figure, hints of electronics accentuate the track, while on the stark “163”, the samples and electronic textures dominate. The sound is glacial in more ways than one, but the faint variations in the melodic pattern at the back of the track is what keeps things moving towards some distant horizon. It’s stunning, and almost reminiscent of material from Fripp and Eno in decades past. Elsewhere, the gorgeous “Tunguska” seems positively lush in comparison to other parts of the musical journey here, while “Vajont” earns comparison to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack work.
An intensely personal album, Marginals stands apart from lots of what I’ve heard lately. It’s simple, direct, and moving in an odd way. By integrating the electronic parts of his art with the cello playing, Ted Laderas is able to make a music all his own here as The OO-Ray. Highly recommended.
Disquiet (Marc Weidenbaum)
Ted Laderas, aka the OO-Ray, is back — or will be soon — with the forthcoming solo album Marginals, on the great Beacon Sound label. It’s due out August 15, 2025. Laderas plays solo cello with an array of electronic accompaniment and processing. Two tracks are up for pre-release listening. Especially recommended is “Harrow,” which has a quiet pulse and thick layers of playing.