A voice calls from the distance, her song carrying through a deluge of rain, beckoning you onward. An enveloping darkness hides what lies ahead. Everywhere the earth rumbles quietly on its axis, while the shadows of the past mill about — their whispers filling the air like the pitter patter of sprites. The voice calls again, though from which direction you cannot say. In the uncertainty, you stop to take stock before pushing on. Here lies a threshold–a gateway into the unknown. Now is the time to discern what you bring to the other side.

“Salvage The Radiance” — Carl Ritger’s followup album for Going In — is an offering of grace in times of profound upheaval. Like his first album on the label, “The Bone of Memory,” this piece marks a passage. This time the music serves as a guide map, a thread running through the membranous spaces that separates here from there, and the life we build for ourselves from the one our families built.

Written in the midst of great familial transition, this near-44 minute album is composed of sounds generated and captured at the artist’s childhood home in Exton, PA, just outside of Philadelphia. A year into the pandemic, he and his r decided to uproot their life in Philadelphia and move west to Colorado. On the way, they spent the winter months helping Carl’s father move out of their longtime family home. There, in the cold Pennsylvania winter when all around him the earth lay still and sleeping, when the home of his youth was on the verge of belonging to someone else, when he and his were themselves rootless, Carl experienced one of his most productive creative seasons in years.

“There's a lot of emotional resonance in one's childhood home,” Ritger said. On “Salvage The Radiance,” he taps into that resonance. Moving through the house, cooking, cleaning, sorting through the detritus of his youth, deciding what they’d keep and what they’d leave behind, Carl harnessed these temporal echoes in the palette of sounds that make up this tender and at times tense unfolding. Using his late Mother’s upright piano, Carl crafted the foundation of the album. From there he added guitar, modular synthesizer and a small selection of effects device. Together these elements gave way to studio experiments, looped phrases, diverse aural textures rooted in generational introspection and peacemaking with one's past.

The piece opens on a wispy synth line, spinning as delicately as dust in the light of a window. It feels dissonant, fragile, a scream, a cry, muffled by a layer of thick, buoyant ambient noise. As time passes, the synth picks up speed before receding into the tide of sound. Soon something darker emerges, guitar feedback swollen and frantic, heralding the oncoming storm. At once the noise turns harsh, pummeling like heavy rain. Thunderous claps of white noise reverberate through the mix. The voice calls out again, and again, her call bathed in wandering guitar chords, ghostly piano riffs and dense sonic textures. It is the sound of the past begging to be reckoned with.

“This album, in a sense, was my way of striking a truce with those memories and learning to live alongside them,” Ritger said.

As a listener, it presents a challenge, requiring both active and passive attention. It may conjure shadows, relics of times seemingly passed, but they are to be looked upon with light; to be sorted into their rightful place, where they might shine, where they might become radiant. Or as it was during Carl’s time at his childhood home, the music might offer a backdrop against which to engage the everyday mechanics of life. Either way, may it bring you peace as you cross your own unknown threshold.