Secret Circuit is the guise of Eddie Ruscha (né Edward Joseph Ruscha V), a sometimes sage known and beloved throughout the Los Angeles creative community. Amongst his earliest musical endeavors, Ruscha co-founded Medicine, an overlooked (until Captured Tracks’ comprehensive 2012 reissue project) four piece whose sinister, snarling take on shoegaze landed them as the first American signing to Creation Records.
After leaving Medicine without a bad taste in his mouth, Ruscha’s focus shifted from his shoes to the endless array of LA music stores housing analog synthesizers, drum machines and effect units forsaken at the advent of digital technology. The early experiments were documented to a Tascam 424 four track, seeping into LA soil when Ruscha would slip a dub-infused Secret Circuit production on the PA at his Dub Club mainstay.
Detouring momentarily from the Secret Circuit motherboard, Ruscha joined Thomas Bullock of Rub n’ Tug to record a ludicrously limited edition disco sleaze rock masterpiece as Laughing Light of Plenty. Ruscha and Bullock met again with Tim Koh (Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti), Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, and Harvey Bassett (aka DJ Harvey) on drums to record a 12” as Food of the Gods.
At the turn of the first decade in our second millennium AD, Ruscha dove head first into his studio work. Ruscha likens this immersion to “striving for alien sound or rhythm that feels natural.” Between 2011 and 2012, Ruscha released no less than four albums (including 2012’s year end vision quest, Tropical Psychedelics), a 12” for Prins Thomas’ Internasjonal Spesial label, a handful of blazing mixes on the Cosmic Papers cassette tape series, and his debut for Beats In Space Records, the Nebula Sphynx / Parascopic Rope 12”.
Ever the unsettled settler, Ruscha consciously crafted the bulk of Tactile Galactics’ tracks at 120 beats per minute. Ruscha played with the equalizing value of this boilerplate dance music BPM in much the same way a DJ might — to set a clear course for transcendence. Just as dance music can move one beyond form, so can the abstract properties of the Avant-Garde, psychedelic rock, and dub, which appear in various textures throughout Tactile Galactics.
Tactile Galactics is derived from a dance lineage promoting feel over form; rhythmically explored without abandon — or audience in mind – by the krautrock fringe, put to the slow motion disco test at Daniele Baldelli’s Cosmic Club, jacked into a House format via the Chicago imprint TRAX and honored today via peer psychonauts like Hieroglyphic Being and Lindstrom.
Tactile Galactics unleashes the lysergic choir of voices in Ruscha’s head against a dance grid, but makes sure it stays in soulful step. For the first time on a Secret Circuit recording, these voices are quite literally present via Ruscha’s own vocals, added when “the song called for them.” It’s by this same regard of the powerful unknown that makes Tactile Galactics Secret Circuit’s most incomprehensibly detailed and stunning release to date.