Maybe this is neither here nor there, but when Noah was 7 or 8, his parents put a trumpet in his hands. Maybe it made him love music, taught him to pay attention to sound, to how cardboard rubbed together can become an instrument, how an acoustic sound can be stretched out and turned to near liquid—a thing you could float in— how stacking delay pedals at random can scramble the smoothness of a song and make something known, unknown. The ordinary, cosmic. And maybe that trumpet had nothing to do with it at all. Probably not. It’s hard to know, really, what’s made us who we are now, and anyways, that was years and years ago.

But for the last five of those years and years ago, Noah has been Runnner and Runnner has been working. Working on his 2021 collection album, Always Repeating; working as a producer on the new Skullcrusher records; and, of course, working towards his debut full-length, Like Dying Stars, We’re Reaching Out. From LA to Ohio and the Northeast and back, he’s been working. And now, in between it all, in the midst of it, is this album, is Runnner in his house recording, is Runnner as guitar, Runnner as banjo, as piano and synth and—yes, there it is too—the trumpet. 

Here is the arts and craft of sound. This is music made in home, using anything and everything, using cell phones and handheld tape recorders, the hum of an ac unit, and voicemails from friends. The edges left deliberately rough because perfection invites predictability and imperfection imbalances, asks the listener to listen again. And then again. And in that listening the sound can become earnest, can ask a question, hold a conversation. 

The emotional reach of this album speaks to the ache of this current moment — when we learned how much we needed language but how language wasn’t enough; when we learned to live outside of our bodies, to extend ourselves through computer screens and online meetings, to slake our yearning for the warmth of other selves, other bodies with our TVs always on. With humor and heart, Runnner sifts through these moments of isolation and anxiety in the everyday—ruining the rice, buying shampoo, the way boredom and loneliness are tangled up together—and from these fragments he stitches together a whole cloth. Something new, but also something already known and felt at once. The familiar made unfamiliar and then familiar again.

This album is the sound of a waiting in motion. The sound of life caught inside a moment, unsure of what comes next. Like an avatar stuck in place at the edge of a video-game map with nowhere left to go, it sings of our desperate attempts to be who we want to be, despite knowing that our attempts will fall short. There will always be a gap between this person inside his head and the one that bends itself to fit into wrong-sized words. 

There is hope and lightness here too, because despite our inability to be what we want to be, to know where we are going, feel we belong, to be present, and to present ourselves fully and completely to the world, it’s this longing to know one another, Runnner offers, that just might connect us, even when the words don’t come. 

like dying stars, we’re reaching out 

so much i can’t say 

but you nodded anyway

- Angela Pelster