Sacred synths

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, June 6th.

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Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: A master of the synthesizer, a master of divinity, and a new album based on the Psalms.

EICHER: Ronnie Martin is back with a project titled Consume Like a Moth What is Dear. It’s part theology, part 1980s electronic nostalgia. And as WORLD’s music critic Arsenio Orteza tells it, that combo makes perfect sense.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Ronnie Martin has been a multi-faceted contributor to the independent Christian-music scene for over 30 years now. In 1994, his and his brother Jason’s alternative Christian band Dance House Children had recently called it quits. Ronnie Martin signed with Tooth & Nail Records, the edgy independent Christian label that introduced acts such as MxPx, Thousand Foot Krutch, Underoath, and Kutless to the world. But even by Tooth & Nail’s envelope-pushing standards, Martin was strikingly different. He called his solo act Joy Electric. Martin embraced the electronic sound world of analogue synthesizers with both arms and wrote from a position of vulnerability in which religious clichés were nowhere to be found.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “Candy Cane Carriage” by Joy Electric]

That’s Melody’s third track, “Candy Cane Carriage,” and in the years that followed there would be plenty of other songs where that one came from. In 2012, after Martin had released 14 albums and 11 EPs, he retired the Joy Electric name.

That’s when he experienced a call to non-musical forms of ministry. His peers affirmed his ministerial gifts, and he realized that he had a desire for what they were affirming. Prayer and introspection followed, and he was ordained in the Evangelical Free Church of America. In addition to pastoring, he became a church planter and the author or co-author of books with titles such as Pastoring Small Towns: Help and Hope for Those Ministering in Smaller Places and The Bride(zilla) of Christ: What to Do When God’s People Hurt God’s People.

Then in 2021, Martin began making music again, this time under his own name.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “From the Womb of the Morning of the Morning, the Dew of Your Youth Will Be Yours” by Ronnie Martin]

That’s “From the Womb of the Morning, the Dew of Your Youth Will Be Yours,” a quotation, incidentally, taken directly from Psalm 110:3 in the English Standard Version. It’s also the title cut of Martin’s first album as “Ronnie Martin.” Other than the prominent programmed drums, it found Martin picking up where he’d left off. As Martin told me recently, by the way, those drums were no accident.

MARTIN: For From the Womb, you know, I wanted to do a record that kind of captured sort of the records from the early-to-mid-’80s, where they used a lot of these really big, over-pronounced drum sounds. And I had never done that. So I really wanted to try that and do that, and I did it.

Now Martin has released a new album, Consume like a Moth What Is Dear. Like From the Womb of the Morning, its title comes from the Psalms. Unlike From the Womb of the Morning, ’80s drums are nowhere to be heard.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “Consume like a Moth What Is Dear” by Ronnie Martin]

The new album finds Martin continuing to base songs on the Psalms. The title cut comes from Psalm 39:11: “When you discipline a man with rebukes for sin, you consume like a moth what is dear to him; surely all mankind is a mere breath!”

Martin says that the album is something of a travelogue detailing his journey through relational rough times during and after COVID.

MARTIN: It’s really a Psalm about—it’s when the psalmist writes about the Lord removing things from him that needed to be removed so that his—you know, basically so that his eyes would be re-shifted back to the Lord. He would remember where his strength comes from, and just sort of the way that the Lord deals with us, very kindly in that way, but also it very much kind of wakes us up, and it brings us to some dark places.

The new album harkens back to Martin’s early goals of making all of his music’s sounds with analogue synthesizers. I asked Martin about his heroes in that field. He said that they include such usual suspects as Keith Emerson, Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream. Then I also asked him about After the Fire, the late-’70s, early-’80s major-label British band made up of Christians and whose music prominently featured synthesizers.

MARTIN: I don’t mention them a lot, but I would say After the Fire, especially the—kind of the greatest-hits Der Komissar album—probably in my top-five favorite albums of all time. Massive influence. I basically say all I’ve been doing my whole career is writing “Love Will Always Make You Cry,” “Carry Me Home,” and “One Rule for You.” Every song I write, I’m just trying to write one of those three songs. That’s it. That’s it right there.

Martin integrates After the Fire’s influence into his own sound well. But sometimes, if you know what to listen for, you can make that influence out—like in this song from Consume like a Moth What Is Dear:

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “Flee like a Bird to Your Mountain” by Ronnie Martin]

That’s “Flee like a Bird to Your Mountain,” and After the Fire should be proud of having inspired it. It doesn’t sound much like “Love Will Always Make You Cry” or “One Rule for You.” “Carry Me Home,” however, is a different matter.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from “Carry Me Home” by After the Fire]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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