Following their self-titled collaborative album announcement and lead single Nervion, Allison de Groot and Rich Ruth have today shared their new single, Distance From Then. Compared to the sonic world of Nervion, the new single has a more earthy start: a field recording of birdsong alongside some beautiful, unadorned banjo and violin, recorded live. Those electronic textures slowly emerge before the two-minute mark, and then build into something more hypnotic and dreamy. The very seeds of the album are tangible here, their singular presence and distinct worlds finding common ground as edges dissolve and they coalesce into a larger movement, like a murmuration. As Ruth says:
“’Distance From Then’ represents the ambition and curiosity of this entire project really well. What started as a solo banjo piece morphed into a live duet with fiddle recorded outside in my backyard. Allison and I expanded the second half by adding Parker James on vibraphone and a lot of fuzz guitar, culminating in a cacophony of intense sounds and rhythm. Like most of these pieces, it went somewhere very different than how it started.”
Allison de Groot reveals how the track began as one of the small melodic fragments she often writes but rarely finds a home for. “I always love writing little lines but often don’t know how to include them in my more traditional music settings,” she says. “I really liked this line, and [Rich] created a whole world around it that fit the vibe perfectly. Like so much of the music on this album, our two very different musical worlds sent the tracks in unexpected directions.”
Allison de Groot & Rich Ruth (October 2nd, 2026) Western Vinyl
Pre-Order the album here: https://lnk.to/degrootruth