August Søren, aka August Lindgren-Ruby ’20, has more than a thousand followers on SoundCloud, an online music-sharing platform. His most popular song, “Come Back into the Light,” has been played more than 49,000 times. But he’s not doing this for fame alone. “If the music is a legitimate expression of what I’m thinking and feeling, as long as I can share it with people I care about, it doesn’t matter how many people listen to it online,” he says.
Lindgren-Ruby, who learned to play classical piano as a child in Portland, Oregon, studies music composition with Carleton professor Andrea Mazzariello. Most of his creations are ambient music, a genre he describes as textural rather than lyrical or rhythmic. Ambient music is emotionally evocative, he says, but capable of fading into the background. His songs feature piano, synthesizers, and recorded natural sounds—including wind and rain—as well as his voice.
“When I put different elements together, they cross-pollinate, and interesting things happen,” he says. “It’s easy for electronic music to sound like it’s all happening in a box with preprogrammed sounds. Bringing in other types of sounds makes it more original and interesting.”
He’s currently working on an album “with a narrative structure that reflects where I’ve been the past couple of years.”
“The world of online music is volatile, and it’s hard to predict what people will like and what they will just pass over,” says Lindgren-Ruby. “It can feel like you’re shouting into a hurricane. You just hope that the right person hears you shouting at the right time and blogs about it.”