“Many found the music offensive, the dancing objectionable, and the popularity of both with young people verging on a mental health crisis.” So writes music historian Susan C. Cook about ragtime, the heavily syncopated ancestor of jazz that arose in the late 1800s. Like all things, ragtime’s subversiveness faded over time, and, a century later, the works of Scott Joplin and other practitioners had been relegated to carnivals and fairs, their jaunty piano melodies now evoking quaint notions of old-timey fun. On their debut album Euphonic Sounds, Los Angeles duo Ragger—Marc Riordan and Jon Leland—aim to recapture some of ragtime’s original spark while giving it a relatively modern edge.
Ragger’s basic idea—ragtime compositions played on electronic instruments—has, incredibly, surfaced before, on The Eden Electronic Ensemble’s Plugged-In Joplin. But that obscure 1975 album has the rotund ripeness typical of the technology of its time. Ragger updates the sound by about 15 years, reenvisioning seven pieces by genre kingpin Joplin and one by George Botsford as video-game soundtracks. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, but it does sound pretty crazy.
Riordan treats such half-forgotten chestnuts as “Swipesey Cakewalk” and “Weeping Willow” with respect, faithfully sticking to Joplin’s marching melodic lines and lockstep harmonies, the unmistakable verve of the source material made even more punchy by the gimcrack timbre of his synths. Leland adds rickety digital percussion—froggy chirps, silicone snaps, coconut knocks, and solenoid cymbals—that makes things both more festive and increasingly awkward. Played straight, ragtime has a formal elegance that complements its peppy strut. You won’t hear much of that poise in Ragger, as Euphonic Sounds leans hard into the lumbering goofiness of the genre’s bozo era. But that zany spirit hits differently when dressed in 8-bit sonics. The vaudeville panache of “Sunflower Slow Drag” becomes the soundtrack to a saloon scene in a pre-PlayStation Final Fantasy; the descending clockwork lilt of “Paragon Rag” will instantly make you feel as if you’ve discovered a hidden bonus level full of strange, wonderful power-ups; the slashing intro of “Original Rags” suggests the looming threat of a tense boss fight and will give you an overwhelming urge to find a save point. Ragger’s nostalgic approach could limit the audience for Euphonic Sounds—those who don’t have abiding muscle memories of Nintendo-era mechanics may find themselves immune to its cockeyed charms. Perhaps that’s part of the point: to make ragtime objectionable again, something that the squares just won’t understand. If you look past the album’s aggressive cartoonishness, however, you may find a weird sort of depth and a rewarding dissonance. Once cutting-edge dance music, ragtime became the stuff of stereotypical yesteryear. By giving it a pixelated makeover, Ragger has collapsed the tail ends of two centuries, combining the youthful pop cultures of the late 1800s and the late 1900s. If ragtime and chiptune fit together so well, it might be because they’re now equally obsolete. Euphonic Sounds might be a colorful celebration of play, but it’s also an acknowledgment that time’s minus world comes for us all.
