Marginals by The OO-Ray

"An intensely personal album, Marginals stands apart from lots of what I've heard lately. It's simple, direct, and moving in an odd way. By integrating the electronic parts of his art with the cello playing, Ted Laderas is able to make a music all his own here as The OO-Ray. Highly recommended." –A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed

Permeated with the burdens and joys of memory, Marginals is in part an effort by cellist Ted Laderas to process his own intense fixation with disasters and their aftermaths. At a time when one can scarcely look at the news without being immersed in one catastrophe or another, this fixation drove his interest in memorializing the victims of such disasters in an attempt to soothe his own anxiety. Thus, each track on the album references a calamity of one sort or another and is intended to be an elegy for those lost. In the face of our society’s frequent avoidance of remembering, the artist found his own solid ground in the exercise of not forgetting.

During the time in which Marginals was created, Laderas was working through his own kind of crisis: a loss of confidence that led to a period of prolonged writer’s block. Having experienced stage fright for many years, he felt like he needed to step back and recalibrate his approach to making music during the pandemic, cultivating a compositional practice and nurturing his own community of fellow musicians (indeed, he organized a weekly online mental health meet-up for similarly-minded Portland artists –“Ambient Zoom”– in 2021 and 2022). How does one transcend an unwelcome sense of competition, or fear of withering judgment, and both protect and share themselves through the twin acts of creation and sharing?



Marginals is the sound of an artist grappling gorgeously with a calamitous, sometimes-callous, world, and emerging with something of a memorial to his own disquiet.

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