Robert "Bink" Ryan currently lives in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He is part owner of Electric Tattoo in Bradley Beach, an accomplished painter with an upcoming solo show in May at Saved Tattoo gallery in Brooklyn, part of the music collective Harmonize Most High who had a record come out in February on Portuguese imprint Ruby Red Editora, as well as a solo artist playing under the name American Cloud Songs with a record due out in the near future.


Chief Magazine: Let's start off pretty standard; aside from just saying that it was good, or pretty normal, what was the definitive moment of your early childhood when in one way or another you had the world figured out?

Robert Ryan: Good question. You know I always had the inclination that as children we were being corralled. The colors they painted the classrooms when we were in grade school, or the temperature those classrooms were kept at made me suspicious at a very young age. Then when I was twelve I watched in the Iran-Contra hearings. A few hours a day I would watch person after person lie, omit, and obfuscate. Then, immediately after, the hearings a talking head would come on and spin whatever Oliver North or John Poindexter said and it was so damn obvious to me as a twelve year old. But all my teachers, relatives, and neighbors would say differently.

So, was it that general feeling, or could you remember a pinpointed specific moment that made you realize a sense of "psychic and symbolic tyranny" that is mentioned in your artist bio?

The final nail in the casket for me was being in high school during Operation Desert Storm and having my classmates and teachers cheer as we dropped bombs down the chimneys of buildings. I was sick to my stomach and honestly it's pretty much when I stopped attending school. I was 16.

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At 16 you were on a skateboard, you heard Black Flag at some point in that general time frame, next thing you knew I was interviewing you. Can you fill in that 20 or so year gap? What keeps you interested in what are mostly considered forms of 16-year-old angst and rebellion, and what makes you absorb them, and move past just repeating what you've already experienced?

Well it's funny you asked me that. I was just thinking the other day I have been going to shows for 21 years now. My first show at CBGBs was in 1987. I was convinced before I even got to the club. It was pre-Giuliani NYC, you still had Bowery bums then. So you had the neighborhood, the music, the attitude, etc. I was totally derailed from my suburban upbringing. I liked the punks and skins, but I really dug the street people that would just be hanging out doing comedy routines and singing for nickels and dimes. It was also the first place I saw Hare Krishnas. It was pretty astonishing. I had seen them portrayed as jokes in movies and such but here you have these real heavy ex and current hardcore guys talking about Kali Yuga, demons, heavenly abodes and self realization. Me and my friends used to also hit up this Black Muslim named Khalid at Astor Place for incense and books like "Mistakes in the Bible" and "The Original Twelve Tribes of Israel " He was really nice to us.  So I was receiving these strange little street lessons on spiritual paths, politics and all kinds of other social issues, which in turn fell in line with the music I was listening to. If I had stayed in Point Pleasant [New Jersey] on those Sundays I would have never been open to these ideas. Later I wound up spending a lot of time in the Krishna community and studying vedic philosophy which I still do to this day. I will try to make the next phases brief. After getting freaked out about communal living and the Krishna movement having a lot of the same pitfalls as all organized religions, I started experimenting with psychedelic drugs. All that I had learned about scripture, music, art, sex, friendship, etc. dissolved and coagulated at this point. You know the Baphomet? It has the inscription "Solve Coagula" tattooed on its arms. To destroy and make whole again, that's what LSD and psilocybin Mushrooms did for me. Broken down and built back up even stronger. I started reading a lot of the Beats and the Dada poets and I started hanging around with some older heads. Both men and women , funny ,these really independent and pretty women which was the opposite of hardcore, where most of the girls were stationary coat racks that stood at outskirts of the mosh pit. So that is when I got turned onto the 13th Floor Elevators, The Stooges, MC5, Captain Beyond, The Up, Hawkwind, stuff like that. It was like a whole rebirth of anti-establishment music culture for me and most of it was so much further out than the punk stuff I had heard. Then my most recent step into the music and cultural unknown is with all the avant garde and free jazz I have been seeing and hearing over the last seven or eight years. Now, playing in Harmonize Most High, I'm getting to meet a lot of these guys. The level of commitment and sincerity is about the highest I have seen. I'm talking about straight up "Lifers" here.  William Parker, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, Dave Ross, Ras Moshe, Matt Lavelle!!These are just some of the NYC guys. Some of the deepest people and hardworking players you will ever meet.

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How did you meet up with some of these "lifers" and everyone involved in Harmonize Most High, including other people that worked on the record such as Dalek?

Man, there were so many synchronicities involved. The first time I saw Daniel Carter play was in the Union Square subway station with his street performance group called "Test." These guys were throwing down so hard in the subway it was totally undeniable.. Two weeks later I saw The No Neck Blues and there is that same guy from the subway! A few years after that my roommate brought home a fanzine with an extensive interview with Daniel . I must have read that interview 30 times over the last five years. Another guy who was in there was punk rock comedian Issac Ramos who I later became good friends with as well. So anyway, fast forward almost nine years. Lord Sterling was playing The opening of "We Jam Econo" The Minutemen documentary. The show was put together by Michael Sternbach who is my co-conspirator in HMH, and he did a set with Daniel Carter and Tim Kieper. That was when I finally met DC. I told him about the times I had seen him play and we had a really nice talk. Well, Mike called me a week later and asked me if I wanted to play a show with them, so I did and that was the basis of the collective we now have.  Each person in that group is so interesting. I really love playing with them all. Some of the guests who played on it were Dave Ross, who is part of The Ras Moshe Sextet, and might be one of my favorite guitar players I have seen in a long time. My proverbial brother Jeff Bradbury from Need New Body also played. Jeff happened to be staying at my place when we recorded the album so he played some Bouzuki and Banjo. Mike Schweigert played a noise guitar track that totally transformed this one piece. My friend Katrina did some singing . It was a really incredible time, all recorded in my living space. The album is completely improvisational, but from all the input and multi-layering it really started to compose itself. I remember watching Jon Francis doing a viola track on this really long movement. There might have been 10 people in my place that night and everybody's jaw just dropped. It was so beautiful the music he was channeling. So after all that, like 12 different people recording on the basic tracks, my house being converted into a 24 track studio, instruments everywhere. And an intense amount of scheduling! We took the tracks up to Dead Verse Studio in Union City. This is Alap and Will from Dalek’s studio. Alap had recorded Lord Sterling's first album and I love working with him. The guy is a genius and about one of the most encouraging engineers I have ever met.. We would work nine hours straight and then smoke so much pot and listen back at the end of the night.  Union City is unbelievable ,90% Cuban. We would take quick breaks, get the best coffee and pastries I have ever had, then right back to work, walking by guys who you know used to sit with the same group of friends fifty years ago in Cuba dressed the same clothes, singing the same songs, cracking the same jokes. It just really helped me creatively to be in that environment . So finally we were getting ready to finish this project which by now had become my baby and Dalek was hanging out that day. There is one moment on the album where we actually hit on a straight beat and Alap said "D you should drop a rhyme on this track." So he listened, pondered and went into his own little area and started writing. Me and Alap left and came back the next morning and his vocals were done, multi-tracked and basically mixed. We listened to it and were both blown away. Alaps quote was "It sounds like Rakim just showed up at the BBQ!" I was so honored to have those guys work on it. They are the Black Sabbath of hip-hop or as Alap says "The Cro-Mags" of hip-hop. Its absurd what they are doing with their sound.