Richard Aufrichtig's open hearted music for modern times; his motto and endearing cosmos
A pensive collection of authentic longing from a wandering yet intellectual being, by way of heartfelt acceptance and quiet kinship to those seeking the same
I find no coincidence the Coronado rip tide succumbed the black snake of resentment and began a child-like journey of intense exploration through healing and discovery while spending an evening meditating to Richard Aufrichtig’s lifelong devotion in his online music library. The ocean itself begins at land’s end; from there, a new world awaits.
One cannot return from the sea wounded. Drown or heal. There is no try, in the ocean. Any lacking or shortcoming after a 12-day bender of complete silence near the entity of infinity is of one’s own architect.
To say that Richard Aufrichtig has a passion for music would run foul of his own existence. There are those who were simply gifted with an unknowing of why; having consumed and ravished information in hordes rather than be rejected by the heartless bastards of western adolescence, a seemingly never-ending state of spiritual and intellectual decay in our society; a cancer.
Richard is a walking library of music and theory, history and poetry, humanity and artistic respect for those in the arts to heal. Those who share their unique light; the only stamp of identification human souls were gifted with at birth. Before the masking.
He has a way of illuminating those who fear their own magnitude. His energy and candor disarm the storms of misconceptions as he comfortably shares space with other artists, often articulating in kindness what many fail in critique.
Richard and I are both recent transplants from a land vastly unknown to many, but he chose Taos to set up his home base, release One More Cup of Coffee; and to form a band; and to launch One More Song, his most recent writing and production of his famed Fresh Wind Sessions, now on a newer and accessible platform:
Present Day New Mexico
I wrote the above six paragraphs in San Diego, CA back in late Feb or early March while spending an entire evening listening to his published library on my headphones, sitting in the salty air of the southern California coast. What you read above are the notes I took that night while listening and browsing his online library of unexplored human emotion during a period of grave personal distress, severe dysphoria, and unresolved trauma conditioning.
A majority of Richard Aufrichtig’s project of that era is aptly titled Oceans, and has a gobsmacking late summer, early fall embrace of the upper east coast of the American Atlantic. Brought up in New England life, yet with the obligatory dogmatic rejection and underlying tone, his Oceans era music vividly captured the essence of growing up and exploring the Hudson River Valley of his youth. Very different vibe over there and very difficult to capture or convey to those not from there. With the warming vocal discipline of an Appalachian autumn blanket, Richard Aufrichtig’s voice epitomizes the influx of energy created by warm summer curiosities, and the prevailing absence of sound, and perhaps love, long after the conflicting noise of tourists gave way to colder temps and foreboding isolation.
Richard also had the wherewithal to publish his vocal power and emotional efficiency early in life in some manner of recorded format. By the time I got to the Coronado coast earlier this year, the intriguing troubadour had been recording music for 20+ years.
I made it to the water and I jumped in.
Richard Aufrichtig’s voice epitomizes the influx of energy created by warm summer curiosities, and the prevailing absence of sound, and perhaps love, long after the conflicting noise of tourists gave way to colder temps and foreboding isolation.
He also has a damn good (informative) website. Richard Aufrichtig In chronological journaling of his late childhood, into adolescence, all the way to the now, Richard has documented everything musically and existentially influential on his journey. I learned a lot about the singer songwriter from the Hudson River Valley by way of European influence, slosh-buckled over to Los Angeles by way of a residency in Sitka, Alaska, and I began to notice a recurring emotion inside me being taunted by his music.
The preface of this piece is loosely what I heard in his music, before my disturbing psychological turning point that would bring me back to New Mexico to write my own creative nonfiction. But first, I wanted to meet the singer songwriter and chill for a weekend, practice my newfound power of presence and soak in the human version responsible for all the recordings I once clung to like a buoy in the cosmic riptide of my own mental dystopia. Richard invited me up and we hung out in the KNCE airstream and again at The Heartbreak Hotel, his home recording studio in Taos, NM.
A lot has happened in both his music career and my personal life since that first evening journey into his catalog, and the two paths have seemingly merged into a union that is human healing through connection (our quiet kinship). Listening to his music led me to a healing expansion of my own, and by way of both the ocean, and yucca desert of southern California, I found the agency and compassion to love myself. Unconditionally.
Just a few short weeks before visiting Richard, I began my own journey of deconstructing and demasking with my newfound agency. I had not yet visited Richard but the deconstruction process began to give me enough capacity to understand the torrent of effort and energy required to sustain a false life. It’s the same torrent an intellectual experiences while struggling to communicate (and cooperate) with a masked world of projected identities.
My body celebrated with movement and I am here now to share my story, in poetic and expansive solitude, surrounded by “open hearted music in these modern times.” (Aufrichtig’s brand, motto, and approach to living in northern New Mexico, loosely captures the same passion that inspires me to write about the healing power of music.)
Chiseling through the masks I had engineered over the years, I found connection with both Richard’s music and the message of Oceans. It pulled me in much like a rip tide would pull in an unsuspecting swimmer. I felt a profound and unapologetic sense of longing in every note, every syllable, and every strum from his carving knife in delicate, yet convincing guitar. I began to hear the Dylan influence in his cadence, adding rhythm with articulation and stressed annunciations. Aufrichtig expresses human longing as effectively as Dylan did with contemporary change. (I asked Richard what he thought Dylan’s legacy was and he responded with change, or evolution. Writing to, and very much with the tides of time in poetry. I used his loose response to my question here but the Dylan legacy opinion credit is all Aufrichtig because I’ve never studied Dylan.)
By the time I made it back to Taos to hang out for a weekend, I was convinced Richard may have defined, with his solo stuff and with Oceans, the essence of longing itself: to desire a thing and yet have no idea what the thing is; to have not yet experienced it. The longing comes from within, based on matters of one’s own conviction, their sole authority for existence. Not necessarily a yearning for future abundance, but a desire to connect with the inexplicable in the now.
Richard’s music doesn’t emerge from a disturbed mind, but it will disrupt the unconscious process of human masking, fully encouraging listeners to seek their own blind spots to authenticity. Philosophers have long since known that authenticity runs counter to society and civilization and is often rejected by absence of mass approval over what is deemed popular in the arts. His entire catalog, including some epic treasures coming out soon in a solo project, convey “what isn’t always known to him” (Aufrichtig), but the weight of longing is transformed into a lifelong journey of musical authenticity: a healing superpower grossly under appreciated by the masked majority.
Intellectuals have become the misunderstood annoyance in western society, often discarded or ignored by family, public schools, dulled mass opinion, and competing interests on the journey from childhood to ill-nurtured adolescence, before discovering nothing is how it was taught to them, well into adulthood. Depression sets with the last warm sunset as the tourists leave and with them, shards of authenticity surrendered to the experience, rarely ever reciprocated. Yet the longing continues and becomes not only a disposition, but a cerebral activator in the cosmic seeker of truth.
Through generational struggle, many intellectuals now find themselves on a point, somewhere on the vast neurological spectrum of modern existence, coping mechanisms, survival through masking, deconstruction, and/or reprogramming realms that make it impossible for the moody and mutable outside world to triangulate their position on a standardized scale. Or simply, any logical scale. Music is often the language of neurodivergence and poetry becomes an efficient method to express their human existence. Poetry in lyricism.
Direct truth becomes an attack on the majority public opinion and schema, but to the mind of an intellectual, it is the most efficient use of language and knowledge without the pesky side effect of emotion or psychological damage blocking the damn thing.
Intellectuals. Dreamers. Youthful, curious minds. They are all who question the status quo, or mass oppressive opinion. They will even question my cosmic and absurd position on the mystical matter.
Stringer. Longing for human connection through music.
Aufrichtig. Longing for human truth through existence.
To sum up all the parts and points on a journey to accurately depict what Richard Aufrichtig is doing in northern New Mexico, and on planet earth, is to miss the very essence of his presence in our midst: a human tape recorder and an open heart for anyone within range invited into his studio to come deliver their truth in music, accepted and published to the world without censor; human truth will then be published on one of his many extensive, and under-appreciated platforms. (True Taos Radio KNCE, Substack, website, local and state newspapers, magazine and photo entries, performance events, etc.)
Below: a 2024 recipient of NMBA Best DJ Personality Aircheck, Small Market division
Points on an existential timeline are invisible up close; zoom out, and the mosaic of Aufrichtig’s journey reveals a distorted, but definitive subject of constant seeking, relentless to the point of obsession. Perhaps Aufrichtig has tapped into the contemporary cosmic suffering as protagonist in a land hell bent on antagonizing preservation of past truth. Maddening to those bloodied knuckles of intellectual conflicts within the collective human spirit, the enigma will forever keep the power of now just One More Song away.
Stringer
P.S. Richard is now hibernating in his home studio, recording a new solo project. I am excited for the world to hear the finished work of fellow writer, music lover, and seeker of uncharted experiences.