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" J. Ralph makes the world sound different. He scores commercials--Nike, De Beers, Porsche, Volvo, the Volkswagen wedding spot that ran for three years--with sonic collages of classical instruments, random noises, and other sounds that bunch the fabric of space and time. His stuff is more beautifully weird than just about any other music broadcast, and since his ads are often better than the programming they interrupt, he&amp;#039;s also one of the most heard artists on the planet.  If you&amp;#039;re an A-list ad creative, you can call up J. Ralph (who answers the phone as Josh) and describe the feeling you want--&amp;quot;some kind of existential, crazy, almost Stockhausen weird representation of the bitter, freezing cold&amp;quot; for Carnival Cruise Lines, for example--and he&amp;#039;ll have the music for your commercial the next day. &amp;quot;I make music every day,&amp;quot; he explains in his hepcat rasp. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll either be working on my own music or somebody will call me up and say, &amp;#039;Yo, do you want to finish something today? I&amp;#039;ll pay you.&amp;#039; I really get off on the fact that the music I do for commercials is instant ideas disseminated to millions of people immediately.&amp;quot; His studio is in a former vaudeville and silent-movie theater on New York&amp;#039;s Lower East Side. It&amp;#039;s lit by candles surrounding a burbling nineteenth-century iron-pedestal fish tank and mini spotlights focused on gilded cherubs thirty feet up. To one side is Duke Ellington&amp;#039;s piano, and to the other, a celesta, which sounds like a toy piano tuned to your nightmares; vintage guitar amps flank a five-foot gong. It&amp;#039;s the Playboy mansion of music gear.  It&amp;#039;s here that the thirty-year-old seduces disparate sounds into odd couplings. For a VW ad called &amp;quot;Squares&amp;quot; (square objects--toast, a Dumpster, a stack of newspapers--flash by until the New Beetle appears to make a circle), Ralph plucked notes on a guitar and then put them through various vintage devices until the result made the viewer&amp;#039;s TV set sound like it was on the fritz. &amp;quot;One Million Miles Away,&amp;quot; the song in the &amp;quot;Big Day&amp;quot; wedding VW ad, lays a music-box keyboard melody under field recordings of a church bell and operatic vocals by &amp;quot;a friend I knew from the neighborhood.&amp;quot; Ralph has no formal musical training outside of a childhood guitar lesson, and he admits to not working in the traditional ways of most composers. Yet members of the Czech and New York philharmonics have collaborated with him. And some of the ads he&amp;#039;s scored have even been put in the permanent collection of New York&amp;#039;s Museum of Modern Art. He is currently scoring the soundtrack to Lucky Number Slevin, a film due next year starring Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley.Not that Ralph seems particularly caught up in success.  &amp;quot;It is,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;all about sounds. That&amp;#039;s all I really care about, you know?&amp;quot; The Sound of the Best and Brightest: To celebrate the imagination and determination of this year&amp;#039;s Best and Brightest, J. Ralph wrote &amp;quot;Enfant Terrible,&amp;quot; a one-take improvisation composed on his piano. &amp;quot;This is an attempt to embody the isolation and concentration of singular thinking,&amp;quot; Ralph says. &amp;quot;The dedication to one&amp;#039;s own path.&amp;quot; To listen to this, as well as other pieces of J. Ralph&amp;#039;s work, go to esquire.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a56/esq1205bbvander-208-5/>