It’s been one strange trip with Ross J. Farrar ever since the CEREMONY, SPICE, and Crisis Man frontman began releasing solo music under his own initialed name in 2023. Strangely fascinating at that, considering he openly professed to never being a professionally trained instrumentalist, and yet, he’s been fucking around and making do in the free form to alluringly weird effect with everything from bass guitars, electronic drums, and droning synthesizers along the way since Going Strange with his debut and then Strange Going on its 2024 kindred follow-up.

Cleaning Out The Empty Administration Building doesn’t break the continuum of its predecessors patterns, though it’s clear Farrar has a firmer grip on his sound — and time’s passage — even if it remains a broadly uncategorizable. The mystique is beginning to flesh in full, conjuring psychedelic magic from the smoky air floating between post-punk, no-wave, avant-jazz, and experimental noise — an astutely complimentary canvas of random parts befitting for the abstractions of the poet’s spoken-sung word impressionism — and placing it within the bolder outlines of this equally weird human experience.

His words are at their most hypnotic when arranged around gothic pathways and the tolls paid in between (“The Solitude of Victory”, “Ovidian”) as well as minimalist, Motorik pulsations (“Traveling Light From Afar”,) as Farrar pieces together fragments that wax existential on the self and outwardly connection, philosophical on the clock’s rendering of it, as well as peering into the daily life in a Hitchcockian sense in a way that upends the mundane and can make it horrifying. The listen’s wordless interludes (“Gravity Hill”, “Frogs”) are portals between this world within other worlds, better known as the R.J.F. creative psyche.

If you find yourself caught between the ether of the neither here nor there in Farrar’s altered dimension, there’s always a peculiar familiarity, be it a strum plucked ever so unevenly (“In Your city”) or a mellow death rattle (“Exile”) to pull you back into the reality of the current physical. You may find yourself standing several steps forward into the future than where you last remember leaving off, but so is this strange journey through living when Ross J. Farrar is at the helm of fucking around with time and space through yet another daring experiment into parts unknown in sound.

Highlights: “Ovidian”, “In Your City”, “Traveling Light From Afar”

R.J.F.’s Cleaning Out the Empty Administration Building will be released August 15th on DAIS Records.

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