With a distinctive sound developed through tireless attention to musicality and artistry, Stick Figure has redefined American reggae music with his latest album, Wisdom, released on September 9th, 2022. As with his previous releases, Wisdom was written, produced and recorded by Scott Woodruff, a self-taught musician, at Stick Figure-owned Great Stone Studios in Oakland, CA, former home of Green Day.
 
Wisdom is Stick Figure’s seventh album and follows the unprecedented success of 2019’s World on Fire, which peaked at number 34 on the Billboard Top 200, #6 overall Top albums, #1 Independent, and #1 Reggae album. World on Fire has sold over 300,000 copies including streaming equivalents, according to Nielsen soundscan data. Stick Figure’s catalog has now sold well over one million copies and been streamed over three billion times. 

Wisdom is a journey and a search for what matters in life–a search for meaning, purpose, place and belonging. Wisdom is a code to live by where we can accept that it is ok to start over, to make mistakes, to love, and to feel pain. It is a reminder to focus on the little things that bring joy and know that all of it is a part of our individual story. It also shows us that we should have some fun doing it all! In signature Stick Figure style, Wisdom can bring peace and happiness in the dark moments as well as in the good times, and the benefits of the music can stay with the listener long after the record has stopped spinning.

Hailing from upstate N.Y. but now situated in the "City of Big Shoulders", Chicago, IL, Ryan Bell a.k.a. Moving Violationz always saw himself involved in music from an early age but was never able to capitalize on any sort of lessons in a particular instrument growing up in the smallish towns of Binghamton and Cortland, N.Y., save for some beginner lessons on the recorder flute and acoustic guitar. He grew up in the seminal early 80's, gaining influence early on from synthpop pioneers Thomas Dolby, Depeche Mode, Erasure, and the Pet Shop Boys and immediately fell in love with the classic sounds of the era's signature keyboards and synths. These sounds are what also drew him to film music, as he was additionally mesmerized by the synthetic classical noodlings of Vangelis, Giorgio Moroder, and Harold Faltermeyer (just to name a couple) for their respective work on the scores for "Chariots of Fire", "Midnight Express" and "Top Gun".

Without sounding like too much of a hard luck case, his ordeal of living a very sheltered adolescenthood, nevertheless, left him without alot of exposure to any kind of music, his first love! Disillusioned, he seemed to wander around aimlessly in a musical wasteland for three years after moving out on his own at the age of 18 in 1992. That was until, while enlisted in the Navy, he stumbled on hearing the classically-tinged synthetic bombast of Hans Zimmer in 2 films that changed his life seemingly forever: "Crimson Tide" and "Broken Arrow" in 1995 and 1996, respectively. With a new found love of film scores guiding his footsteps and ideas, Ryan resolved to ultimately become a composer of the film music he had started to (at this point) avidly collect and admire. Little did he know what would step up to greet him, influence, shape, and mold his musical directions next!

Upon moving to Chicago and meeting his Occum's Razor bandmate, Truth One a.k.a. Andy Woodman in 2000, Ryan was introduced to the menacing, pummeling breakbeats of drum and bass/jungle through a CD of Andy's from Philadelphia DJ and producer Dieselboy called "The 6ixth Session"! What struck Ryan like a 500 megaton bomb was the fact that drum and bass, like film scores, seemed (and indeed is) the perfect music of such extreme contrasts, tranquil and a thing of beauty one second and then, unexpectedly, a brutalizing juggernaut of beats bludgeoning you into submission. This was evident in "The 6ixth Session"'s opening transition from Dieselboy's own peaceful but dissonant intro to the battle cry, angry reece, and subsequent "murder-the-world" beats of Konflict's seminal jungle anthem, "Messiah".

Needless to say, it was all "downhill" from there, as the impression left by this new (to Ryan) form of music truly changed his life---FOR GOOD! From then on, it wasn't enough that he should attempt to DJ the music that had permanently changed him, HE WANTED TO CREATE IT!

Going off of what he had learned hands-on about creating film scores -- he had created an 8-cue demo CD of interesting soundscapes he felt would be useful in various types of visual media a few years prior -- Ryan set out to pay homage to all his influences by creating what would hopefully be an interesting melange of classical touches, trancey atmospheres as well as (on the other side of the coin) militaristic drums and angry textures. What you hear on this page is a culmination of these efforts!

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