Gryphon Rue (b. New York City) is an artist, composer, and musician. His approach fuses collage, improvisation, and the recombination of materials and recordings to build works in both sound and image.
Rue’s music is shaped from layered textures and field recordings, crossing the boundaries between the natural and the digitally transformed. Drawing from processes found in nature—feedback, cycles, emergence, and systemic interaction—the artist uses environmental sounds and processed instruments to emulate organic patterns and phenomena.
The artist’s wall pieces on cut metal, lenticular backpacks, and painted board—at times encased in found RV skylights—are collaged and abstracted from cross-cultural and ethnographic sources, registering as both poetic gestures and archival traces. His automatic drawings likewise reflect the spirit of listening and improvisation that animates his electroacoustic performances.
His 2025 album I Keep My Diamond Necklace In A Pond Of Sparkling Water: “Creaking and grumbling and humming with subterranean and oceanic immensity, singing in voices both animal and botanical” (The Quietus); Best Field Recordings on Bandcamp. “A conjuror in stereo” (Electronic Sound) who “plays with sonics in a way that a visual artist might manipulate light” (The Quietus), Rue brings to his music “restless energy, offering up bright, sweet packet-sized servings of electroacoustic crispness, pulsing ambient techno, and Cluster’s proto-industrial chug” (The Wire).
As a 2023-2024 Jerome Artist resident at Roulette, he premiered Playing The Beetles with Ka Baird and Qasim Naqi (Best New Experimental Music on Bandcamp), as well as North American premieres of Giusto Pio’s Motore Immobile and Ananta. Other collaborators include Christine Sun Kim, Susie Ibarra, Dean Wareham, Will Epstein, Alex Waterman, Sean Meehan, Edwin Torres, and Benton C Bainbridge. He has performed at venues and festivals such as Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, Fondazione ICA Milano, de Young Museum, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Hepworth Wakefield, Vector Hack Festival, Roulette Mixology. He has organized exhibitions and festivals for institutions such as Ballroom Marfa, the Calder Foundation, and Printed Matter.
His programs with Montez Press Radio include conversations with figures such as David Behrman, “Blue” Gene Tryanny, Annea Lockwood, Clark Coolidge, and Fran Lebowitz. Rue edited and “composed” Strange Attractor (Inventory Press & Ballroom Marfa), an artist book exploring the poetics of networks, environmental events, and sound, through contributions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Merlin Sheldrake, Bernadette Mayer, Beatrice Gibson, Haroon Mirza, among others.
Contact:
gryphonrue@gmail.com