There is no big mystery what the acronym R.J.F. stands for – and who is behind the Going Strange album. It is Ross John Farrar from Ceremony, and the album actually represents his solo debut.
And while Ceremony itself is something you can definitely call a punk band, Farrar goes in so many directions here, that he probably himself wouldn’t be able to say exactly what genre this music belongs to, except that you could add that now so popular ‘post-‘ prefix in front of it.
Yet, the key question remains, is it just a set of disparate sounds or a coherent musical whole that makes sense?
First of all, it is quite obvious that Farrar favours all those dark-toned sounds emanating from the eighties, from The Cure to early electronic innovators to 4AD sounds in general. He seems to have had the idea to present this music in a form of a long-running cassette tape, as the whole album, although containing separate music pieces runs like a one 47 minutes or so track.
At the same time, even though starting out just as a vocalist and somebody who is possibly not so adept at playing instruments, Farrar was able to come up with quite a coherent musical concept here, with obvious personal knowledge of the sounds he loves and at the same time the ability to turn all that into very individual music.
It all actually sounds quite minimalistic and complex at the same time resulting in a quite immersive musical experience.
