A grown-up gnostic stares down difficult truths.
SAMUEL HYLAND
One
Ten years ago, the Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon, who doubles as a contemporary artist, curated a Top-10 list for the December, 2015 issue of Artforum. Sprawling constraints—the coolest stuff of 2015—bred sprawling selections, which included, in no particular order: the reunion of Royal Trux, the acquisition of Pitchfork by Condé Nast, the budding girl-group The Coathangers, and the May 12 episode of the “Bret Easton Ellis Podcast.” Hidden at number 10, as if smuggled, was a scraggly musician named Gods Wisdom, whose diseased avant-rap was zany, irreverent, and a little divisive. In the music video for “Christian Dior,” a scuzzy Witch-House facsimile, he rolled around naked in a hefty blanket, slurring his words while maintaining intense eye contact. Gordon called it “one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen.” She also called it “the future,” which, like Gods Wisdom, was three things: zany, irreverent, and a little divisive.
“You’re going through crazy shit, I’m going through crazy shit… it was like a portal had opened.”
When “Christian Dior” came out, Gods Wisdom, born Reuven Ender, was an eccentric member of Dark World, a New England collective he no longer associates with. That crew, which has since disbanded, melded darkwave, hypnagogic pop, and Southern rap into a nomadic pastiche: woody expanses, Goth contours, lots of slack-jawed knife-wielding. Ender, then 20, rapped with an exaggerated snark, like a sickly brat with a terminal sinus infection. He was niche and alluring, the kind of musician who drew YouTube comments, many presumably from intrigued adolescents, like “very avant guarde,” or “one of the most experimental artists ever,” or “This is REAL music right here.” Those comments, specifically, appear under the music video for “She’s So Goth,” from Ender’s 2015 mixtape Goth. Where Goth scrapbooked a Frankenstein of its titular subculture, this single, its thematic centerpiece, spewed a rollicking thesis statement, stitched together with silly—and, at times, sacrilegious—non-sequiturs. In the homespun music video, Ender mucked around in a sunlit backyard, lip-syncing one-liners like “Oh no, my dog ate my girlfriend” and “I’m in Heaven… I’m burning.” It was difficult, as per usual, to determine whether this was “the future” or a prankster’s patchwork of the past. The following year, in an interview with the Fader, an estranged peer offered a sparse, provisional exegesis: “The Gods Wisdom character is the inside of any middle class white boy’s mind.”
This severely overestimated the range of experiences available to middle-class white boys: by then, Ender had been kidnapped by homeless crack addicts, had a sexual relationship with his high-school teacher, written—but never published—a book about a deceased friend, experimented with malicious older men, abused deadly substances, and survived multiple near-fatal encounters. But if the 2010s were a hallmark decade for angsty, rap-adjacent middle-class white boys, then “Gods Wisdom,” the character, was something of an apotheosis: post-SALEM, pre-Sematary, alleged tenth coolest occurrence of 2015. He had crossover appeal, a studied ability to aggregate—musically and aesthetically—generations of raffish ennui-expats, from Gordon’s CBGB chums to Jack Donoghue’s Flickr followers. (Rest in peace, Johnny Thunders: you would have loved this mop-headed masochist hollering “Hurt Me,” sounding quite hurt already.) Sometimes, Ender could be a fumbling rapper, and other times, a bumbling guitarist, singing about his dreams or shredding, wordlessly, for nightmarish stretches of harsh noise. For all its breadth in modes, his footprint also traversed moods, which presented fun questions—Was this a parody of something? Was the point the juvenile innocence or the latent existential dread? Was he being serious on the “Toolbox” verse, and how did Sematary land the feature? Other questions were vaguely morbid. Questions, for instance, like the one I think of when I hear “hatemyself/another seizure,” a YouTube loosie that approximates Hell with a dissonant guitar, a cranked mini-amp, and several hoarse, anguished hollers: Is he alright?
“I’m super duper pussy. Back then, he was much more dark. But he’s growing as an artist—and as a person—and I think that’s beautiful.”
“Ruvi hates when I worry about him,” the musician Deja Carr, who performs as Mal Devisa, said. Carr, 28 and living in Massachusetts, befriended Ender in 2013, when they both attended a drug-addled high school for the performing arts. (One night, Ender, then a senior, allegedly stuck his “teeny head” out of a car window and hollered: “You’re Deja, right? Do you wanna be friends?” They have been inseparable for twelve years.) By then, she had freshly sprung a solo career, and her music—jazz-inflected, sample-based, and spiritually dense—probed the weight of being a Black woman in rural, predominantly-white New England. In Western Massachusetts, where being “tapped in” was a ticket to artistic community, she had rubbed shoulders with a budding, zany scene, largely through Ender—a “wizard” of sorts, whose oddball character belied his prodigious musicality. Within a year, the pair had collaborated on a slew of strong singles, each buoyed by a peculiar contrast: Gods Wisdom, a breathy, rapping ghoul; and Mal Devisa, a reformed Gospel singer with a funk sensibility. Their songs were existential, outwardly skeptical of organized religion (“Shouts out to the Bible, yeah that’s some bad advice”), and simmering with youthful paranoia. Years later, shadows of that unease linger, like shrapnel from a hectic, not-so-distant past. “I’ve talked to him about the fact that I don’t like dark shit,” Carr said, bluntly. “I’m super duper pussy. Back then, he was much more dark. But he’s growing as an artist—and as a person—and I think that’s beautiful.”
Carr describes Ender as a “genius,” albeit an elusive one: “He’s literally my best friend in the world,” she told me over text, “and he might sometimes reply.” (Ender’s Instagram bio, which is also the title of a Gods Wisdom song: “very reclusive.”) As an artistic figure, Ender has long embodied, maybe caricatured, the supernatural numbness of the middle of nowhere—the latent violence of Tulsa, the ghoulish banality of Wisconsin Death Trip, and the faceless menace of King Night, born anew in people like him, and places like rural Massachusetts, like a malignant ancestral curse. In its heyday, his ex-collective melded frat-house masculinity with similar mysticism: goofy, yet fundamentally bleak, as if procrastinating existential doom. Ten years later, “the future” Kim Gordon foretold has arrived, and Ender, now 31, no longer seems as interested in deflecting it—nor its complex feelings—with a wink and smirk. Sometimes, those unearthed feelings are comparatively light: like in 2022, when he released the freewheeling February Motel, an umpteenth joint project with fellow New Englander LUCY (Cooper B. Handy). Other times, the psychic dread that haunted his early material is more daunting—no longer a subtext, but very alive, and very difficult to ignore. This past November, he surprise-released the screeching My Closest Friend, a bleak joint album he recorded with the producer E_DEATH during a “terrible time.” Suddenly, there was no question whether the anguished screams were satire.
“His 2014 album ‘Goth,’ recorded as a teenager, was the official stylistic starting-point of much to follow. Since then, he’s influenced everything and everyone with his music, words, sense of aesthetics, and undocumented thoughts.”
The term “wizard” feels particularly apt for Ender, an elusive figure whose detritus, compiled over the past decade, is strewn across SoundCloud archival pages and deep-cut YouTube videos. But it also feels apt, maybe more so, for Ender the shape-shifter, a virtuoso untethered to a single form, and therefore also—maybe to his detriment—a single identity. No longer typecast as a gothic goofball, his output, like him, has grown eclectic, ephemeral, and difficult to pin down: a noisy saxophone-guitar release with Mal Devisa; a wistful, virtuosic blues-piano EP; and, if you Cashapp him nine dollars, a trove of unreleased rap songs he recorded between 2016 and 2020. Is this all the same person? If Gordon was right, then not necessarily—the “future,” it turns out, is full of squawking, punk-tinged suburban white boys. Where does Gods Wisdom fit on the iceberg? Not long ago, Ender, whose own teenage squawkings somewhat overshadow his evolving sound, began using a curt, understated bio for bookings and engagements. “Gods Wisdom is an artist & writer living in rural Western Massachusetts USA,” it begins, then continues, both facetiously and somewhat factually: “His 2014 album ‘Goth,’ recorded as a teenager, was the official stylistic starting-point of much to follow. Since then, he’s influenced everything and everyone with his music, words, sense of aesthetics, and undocumented thoughts.”
Two
At 11:57 PM on New Year’s Day, I receive a text from Ender, who prefers “Ender” over his government surname, because “Ender,” unlike Arnold, honors his martyred ancestors. That teenager, a “weird” savant at a performing arts high-school, was deeply reverent of these ancestors, and sought to channel them in his strange music: not flippantly obtuse, but “intentionally off putting” and “unlikeable,” as a defense mechanism against the forces that destroyed them. “I felt I couldn’t do anything that society would really deem appropriate or understandable,” the text message reads, “because I felt our society is a continuation of the same one that murdered so much of my family.” The “typing” bubble is still going, and I am conflicted: it is not good journalistic practice to alter an article, especially not after the subject—who really should not have read it—has read it. But at 6:20 AM two days prior, when I had sent a password-protected preview for fact-checking purposes, I woke up to dozens of lengthy, frantic texts, from someone who had been misrepresented: not necessarily by what I had written, but what I had chosen not to write. Among these texts was an image of concentrated soursop extract. In the preceding message, Ender mentioned having been “like realllly on deaths door” and “pulled myself outta it” via “non western medicine etc my strongest recommendation would be soursop bitters and poppy tea (Pictured).” Another, earlier text: “Pls let me escape these symbols of the most boring aspects of my 18-19 yr life.”
Three
It was a little before 9, one recent Monday evening, when the lead singer of B.L.I.X., a New York rock band, scanned a Bushwick bar-qua-arcade with squinting eyes. “Gods Wisdom is next, I think,” she said, looking around. “Is he here? Ruvi, are you here?” No one responded, and in the awkward silence, she began to thank the audience, who were fiddling, backs turned, with dusty joysticks. Tucked away behind a creaking door, the Wonderville arcade room doubles, sometimes, as a live-music venue: claustrophobic, hazardous, and teeming with backs pressed against vintage coin-ops. Tonight, during pregnant silences, those coin-ops offered a convenient distraction. But this particular silence, which bore concerning implications, felt heavier, I thought, checking my phone between rounds of Armed & Gelatinous. Ender hadn’t texted. I wondered when, or whether, it would be appropriate to start worrying.
When the producer Salem Anhedonia, who records as E_DEATH, reached out to Ender in 2023, she was taken by his “crazy” sound, which squared with her own “crazy” experiences. “I was living with Ethel Cain in Alabama with no water or electricity,” she said. “It was a mess.” One day, while binge-listening to Gods Wisdom with her brother, she had an epiphany (“Why the fuck are we not friends with him?”) and DMed him with music they were working on. He was unusually quick to respond, and unusually quick, also, to send vocals. “We were at a funeral,” she recalled, “and we come home and he immediately sends us this verse. It’s literally just him being like: I’m thinking of killing myself.”
By the fall of 2022, Anhedonia had moved from Alabama to Pittsburgh, where she would eventually meet Ender two years later. In the intervening time, their friendship had grown from “little IG DMs” to “14 hour phone calls,” while their musical project—a brooding, sinuous take on electroclash—sprawled in size and scope, too. Anhedonia remembers seeing “eye to eye” with Ender, to the point where it felt psychic: “You’re going through crazy shit, I’m going through crazy shit… it was like a portal had opened.” (Online, both have vaguely referenced bleak lows: Anhedonia called the original demos, from 2022, a “farewell letter to the world,” while Ender alluded to “the absolute darkest of times.”) When Ender drove to Pittsburgh to mix the album, they shared a single pair of headphones, a “busted” laptop, and a “shit ton of adderall.” SRL, the name they settled on, has “a million” meanings, one of which is (loosely) “Salem Ruvi lifestyle” — a bleak one, but not one without its own kind of beauty. “That time period was intense, really sad, and really cathartic,” Anhedonia said. “But there was a lot of hopefulness, too. I knew that [Ender] was protected by angels. He seemed to be pushing for the light.”
Four
The song “Stillborn” by Burning Witch, a short-lived doom metal band, is 11 minutes and 37 seconds long. It was playing when the menacing crack addicts, two stern 40-somethings, began driving a teenage Ender towards a shady house in the middle of nowhere. Ender and his friend had just finished playing a metal show. They wanted weed, but their usual plug was unavailable, which led them to the men against the wall: Would they happen to have weed? Yes, the men said. But we will have to give you a ride to the place where we can get the weed for you.
The car belonged to Ender’s parents. Originally, when the strange men got in, he was behind the wheel: rolling cautiously down a dusty road, following instructions. At a certain point, the men said that they needed to drive now. And so, suddenly going 75 in a 35, Ender braced himself in the front passenger seat, watching the window as it showed him increasingly unfamiliar things. Inside, it was awkward, on two occasions: first, when it was silent, and then, when it was loud. Ender had popped Crippled Lucifer into the CD player. For two strange, uncomfortable minutes, the vehicle pulsed with abject, antisocial doom metal. “What the fuck is this shit?” one of the 40-somethings said, and immediately shut it off.
The men parked near a decrepit house and went inside for 45 minutes. Ender did not call the police, because he did not want his parents to find out that he had followed suspicious men into the middle of nowhere for weed. When they emerged from the house, they regained control of the wheel and drove to a dusky corner—the sort of corner, Ender says, where “you buy crack at one in the morning,” which they did, before smoking it in his parents’ car. Ender politely declined to have any. His friend, who had approached the men in the first place, accepted. Ender wonders whether the entire thing was a setup.
Five
The lights in Wonderville were dim at 9:20-ish, when Ender skulked through the creaking door and into the arcade room, looking a little disheveled, like a tardy student shuffling into class. He wore pitch-black sunglasses, a John Coltrane trucker hat, a flashy cardigan, skinny jeans, and a mini-backpack with gold studs—Dylanesque, if Bob Dylan grew up on SALEM and shopped at American Apparel. Later, he left the room and returned with a handful of loose items: a beaten-up Stratocaster knockoff, a drumstick, a 20-watt mini-amp, and a scarlet AKAI Mini MK4. Foal-like, he awkwardly ambled over to the stage, where the rapper Roman New Time—who took his slot while we waited—was sing-speaking about hating life. He set the loose items down at the edge, then shimmied into the scattered crowd, between furtive trips to the bar. Over text, I had told him that I would be wearing a cat-ear beanie. The first time we made eye contact, I began to greet him, and he looked away.
“The first couple of shows I saw him play—the summer after senior year, when I moved out here—it was just experimental noise stuff, no vocals. Then around that time, 2012-2013-ish, he started experimenting with the rapping. I had a feeling that it would be good to work together.”
Earlier that afternoon, I had spent considerable time searching “Gods Wisdom Live” on YouTube, filtering out youth pastors, and pinballing, obsessively, between various grainy home-videos. In one, Ender was surrounded by fratty boys in a dark, sweaty room, freestyling about beer over live drums. In another, he was yowling and grunting next to a breathy rapper, clutching a plastic cup. Seven months ago on his own channel, he had uploaded Heated Floors, the eponymous debut EP of his and Mal Devisa’s guitar-saxophone project. The second of two lengthy tracks was live, from a time they had opened for the No-Wave pioneer Lydia Lunch. It sounded like the sinking scene in Titanic, where the ship starts creaking and groaning.
Ender had also texted me, earlier that afternoon, a two-minute audio file. It was his favorite track from a forthcoming album with Mal Devisa, and quite sparse: a far cry from a sinking ship, or the souls of the damned. Two weeks prior, when I had spoken with Carr, she was frustrated, because Ender was taking forever to master the files, which he had promised—her and I alike—to send by that evening. (“It’s been, like, half a year. It doesn’t take me that long to do anything ever.”) Neither of us received the album by daylight. I did receive, however, thousands of megabytes of unreleased music, which he emailed me in sporadic bursts: a tender guitar song with a “labeled up” indie darling, a trove of blues-guitar jams with a friend, several jazzy piano ballads, and a cash-grab compilation album he had briefly sold, a year ago, for rent money. Sifting through it all, I had the sense that I was hearing several talented people, several tormented souls. Some of them seemed to be in Purgatory. Many of them seemed to be somewhere much lower.
Thousands of feet above the underworld, an aloof Ender conferred with an audio technician, who briefly left, iPad in hand, to rummage for a USB converter. Setup was a cartoonish sight: here was a guy ambling around in John Coltrane merch, hauling a long intestine’s worth of tangled cables, and jamming a drumstick underneath his battered guitar strings. (Saith the Lord, apparently: What if Tom Waits took the Substance and went the Scott Walker route?) Upon returning with the converter, the technician asked for two sound-checks: one, for the MIDI controller, and the other, for the guitar-drumstick contraption on the floor. During the first sound-check, Ender bobbed his head to a boom-bap beat, noodling through lightning-fast blues improvisations. During the second, he crouched low and fiddled with a delay pedal, striking the guitar with the drumstick until it howled, woundedly, like a wolf with life-threatening injuries. The audio technician looked at him like a concerned parent.
Six
Early last spring, Ender released Royal Trucks of Melting Ice, the second of two blues-piano projects he has recorded, over the past decade, with drums by the musician LUCY (Cooper B. Handy). When Handy met Ender in the early 2010s, he was a high-schooler in Eastern Massachusetts, road-tripping with friends to occasionally catch shows in South Hadley. At Pioneer Valley Performing Arts, where Ender and Carr attended high school, a sprouting scene bred eccentric, quirked-up experimentalists—among them, a young Ender, who was playing DIY noise-guitar sets long before he started rapping. “I was very impressed with his swag and style,” Handy recalled, between chuckles. “The first couple of shows I saw him play—the summer after senior year, when I moved out here—it was just experimental noise stuff, no vocals. Then around that time, 2012-2013-ish, he started experimenting with the rapping. I had a feeling that it would be good to work together.”
“He’s really good with the minor blues on piano—that’s his bag. Adding jazz drums to his playing-style maybe gave it this thing of Oh, this sounds like jazz. But I think we were just playing what we were feeling.”
Before they ever shared a studio, Ender and Handy shared several showbills, in several settings: teeny living-rooms, chaotic house parties, and, on one occasion, SUNY Purchase, where Ender recited a “spoken-word piece about how we’re all rats in a cage.” When Handy graduated high-school in 2013, he moved to Western Massachusetts, while Ender, freshly graduated himself, honed an irreverent, Goth-tinged brand of internet rap. Their earliest joint efforts, post-high school, juxtaposed not only their unique palettes, but sensibilities—like the stuporous “Scan” (2015), which spiked Handy’s high spirits with Ender’s anxious croak, and the slick “What a Day” (2016), whose jumpy synthpop rasped and wheezed, like an optimistic asthmatic. In the years since, their strongest collaborations—namely, On Thin Ice and February Motel—have aptly showcased this yin-yang: “Our voices are very different,” Handy said, “in a way we discovered works extremely well.” But where those projects might have sprawled, their two jazz EPs largely skulk, with Ender—the sole vocalist—shirking raucous raps for well-studied barroom blues. The disarming thing, tonal shift aside, is how intentional it all sounds: mulled-over and highly fluent, even if scrappy or ragtag. “I think he has a natural ear,” Handy continued. “He’s really good with the minor blues on piano—that’s his bag. Adding jazz drums to his playing-style maybe gave it this thing of Oh, this sounds like jazz. But I think we were just playing what we were feeling.”
Dimmed lights, loose chatter: what could Ender have been feeling now, hunched over a peculiar rig at a show he was late to? Ableton aglow on his shades, he looked lanky, somewhat coltish, in his skinny-jeans—the spitting image of Chet Holmgren, except that this was not a postgame presser, and Chet Holmgren is no Chet Baker. Ender is no Chet Baker, either. But in some ways, this very binary, of who he is and is not, is blinding: he is almost obscured by the sheer amount of things he can do. That evening, every time he settled into a character—Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, a lonely barroom crooner, a go-lucky cabbie—he simply conjured another, compounding identities until his own, Gods Wisdom, was a name on a setlist, a hand zipping across a MIDI, a cipher wearing sunglasses. All I knew, then and now: Ruvi Ender, whoever he was, was very talented, and maybe a little troubled, too. And what exactly were these troubles? Near the end of his set, Ender walked towards his guitar, sprawled corpselike across the creaking floor. Rumbling behind him was “The Mystery of Livin’,” an unnerving single from last April, which strips his early sacrilege of its snark:
It’s just the mystery of livin’
And I know now that I’ve seen it all
But I am still insane.
It’s just the mystery of livin’
And I know now that God sees it all
But I’m livin’ in sin.
Structurally, this song, like Ender, is strikingly Dylanesque—gnostic musings that feel vaguely scriptural, as if this guitar-slinging nomad is a doomsday prophet. Yet in all its meandering blues-poetry, it also prolongs existential dread, no longer content to delay reality—or aestheticize its angst—the way Gods Wisdom once did. When you are a teenager, like that oddball avant-rapper was, there is tomorrow: “The future,” Kim Gordon said, and so long as that “future” is not here, you are free to treat its mysteries, of death and damnation, as empty images. The difficult thing about futures is that they come fast. When Ender was an irreverent teenager, his ascent mirrored an influx of trendy, visually-appealing Gothicism—kids in corpse paint, pentagrams on their Tumblr feeds, “Witch House” on their playlists. A decade later, as those aesthetics ravage younger audiences, their previous torchbearers increasingly wonder what lies beneath. “When I met Ruvi, I was tired—and still am—of how TikTok-ified music has become,” Anhedonia said. “There’s this sort of fake esotericism, and fake swag, and fake coolness that isn’t even there. Gods Wisdom is what these people want to be. He is who they think they are.”
“The book of Job especially is so good. That man suffered. I love that story. It’s totally good. It’s great slapstick comedy.”
Oftentimes, when I listen to Ender’s recent music, I still picture him, for some reason, as a teenager: a lanky, huge-haired kid with an eye for Goth imagery, heaving through one-liners, flirting with sacred things. This is a convenient image of Ender, because it is the image of Ender I, and many others, grew up with. But Ender is an adult, and adults, unlike teenagers, have difficult questions that are not very funny. When he finished wailing the ones in “The Mystery of Livin,” he crouched down and jabbed at his guitar, frantically dialing a delay pedal, until the noise became suffocating, claustrophobic. This is a real person, I thought, then again, midway through the following set, when he placed a hand on my shoulder. “Should we talk?”
Seven
The Gods Wisdom of Goth was a croaking, zombified cryptid, spewing strange poetry as if dry-heaving ancestral poison. This was intentional, Ender had told me: he did not want to appease an evil system. And yet, there was still the go-lucky lounge music of the Wonderville set, which was not very inaccessible at all—quite appeasing, actually. This month, he plans to release another blues-piano EP, and then on Valentine’s Day, a lovestruck full-length. Where had his contempt gone?
Near midnight, he sends another long text message. He “understood things differently later on,” he says, and has since tried to “create stuff that would be soothing and hopeful though still challenging.” This, I realize, is something I misread: Ender is not obscured by the “sheer amount of things he can do,” but the sheer amount of lessons he has learned, and is still attempting—in real time—to appropriately apply. At the show, I had noticed this multiplicity, and immediately clocked it as a weakness: Why? Because I didn’t know who Ender was? There had, in fact, been many Enders, and in the one on-stage, I sought only the ones I could recognize: the squelching teenager of Goth, the slack-jawed emcee of Self Restraint, the yowling kid in a YouTube video I had watched. These people were no longer real. The person in front of me knew things, difficult things, that they could not conceive of.
The evening of the original fact-check, I had begged Ender, over text and email, for one more interview. Could he tell me about these things? About the “way more interesting” life he had lived, beyond the ossified image — a “cardboard cutout of a rebellious boy-scout” — he had grown to resent?
Eight
Never had “Beep Beep,” Ender and Handy’s dubby 2016 single, been as painfully relevant as right now: midnight in midtown, Ender vying for a parking spot, and a chorus of flustered horns beeping away, middle fingers flying from open windows. Puffing on a vape, Ender, driving a weathered white van, seemed to care only a little. Not long prior, he had switched from the blues station to a Robert Johnson album he liked. CDs, books, and worn effects pedals littered the back seat; in the trunk, his guitar, the only one he has ever owned, sat face-down, uncased. “Are you pulling out?” Ender asked, looking at the man in our desired parking spot, but not rolling down his window. “Is he moving?” The man, who was not moving, exited his vehicle and began wildly gesticulating. Pulling into gear, Ender paused, then changed the subject: if you read closely enough, many sacred texts are actually very, very funny. “The book of Job especially is so good,” he said, smiling. “That man suffered. I love that story. It’s totally good. It’s great slapstick comedy.”
“I don’t really watch TV or movies at all. I get headaches from screens. I also think TV and movies are mediocre.”
As an auteur, Ender, like the book of Job, has long melded the sacred with the slapstick. But if slapstick comedy was the subtext of Job, then for Ender, the subtext is suffering—not only when he raps, in that breathy, rasping yowl, but also when he speaks, in chipper tangents that belie the serious things at hand. He was born in the early 1990s, to a mother from Forest Hills, Queens and a father from “the middle of nowhere” in rural Iowa. His grandparents, on his mother’s side, are among 3 survivors of a family eradicated during the Holocaust: “the whole thing is really crazy,” he said, eyes on the road, no longer wearing his shades. As a “talkative” kid, he pinballed between Iowa, where he purchased his guitar at a pawn shop, and Western Massachusetts, where he enjoyed an education of extremes: a conservative elementary school that depressed him, and a “super hippie middle school,” where having good grades, as he did, could let you “get away with anything.” Some things have changed: Ender no longer gets good grades. Last year, he re-enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, where he remains begrudgingly invested, but not necessarily depressed—just annoyed. (Before UMass, he briefly attended and dropped out of “a fancy school” — Columbia University — that did not provide adequate aid.) “This shit is such bullshit, really,” he said, sounding mildly irritated. “I don’t know why I’m submitting myself to let these fucking people tell me what to do.”
One convenient reason: Ender is being paid thousands of dollars per month to attend UMass, and with that money, he is slowly rebuilding his life. These days, he rents a studio near his parents, whose body-work profession exposed him to “vibrant people” when he was a kid. Ender is himself vibrant, and in certain ways, his vibrant lifestyle has given him not-so-vibrant holes to dig out of. A week or so before the Wonderville show, he alluded, during a lengthy phone call, to a stretch where he “lived on Adderall and french fries for five years—I kind of lost all my plots.” Between the pandemic and now, these “plots” included, but were not limited to: a psychosis-induced attempt to reinvent the number system, a period of involvement with a “cult-like organization of people from the Barbados in Little Haiti,” a consequential drug binge in New York, and a revelatory pilgrimage to Poland, where he rekindled ancestral roots while reaching an artistic peak. Out there in Europe, he spent a prolific three months meeting, and bonding with, a slew of nearby “geniuses”—among others, Rock Angelz, a nine-woman electroclash crew he admires, and Evanora Unlimited, an American knob-turner who had been there on tour. Two summers ago, he and EUROPU$$Y, from the Angelz, jointly-released Tarchominska 6, the eponymous debut single of their dubby duo project. In the car, when I asked him about a song of theirs he’d performed at Wonderville, he was curt: “I like harmonizing with women.”
Nine
Ender informs me that he would like to clarify the “I like harmonizing with women” quote, which does not adequately convey his reverence. I bristle at the idea of allowing a subject to clarify something they said. I also bristle at the idea of journalism that leaves things to be clarified. “I really do think women have the capacity inherently to be better at self expression and are just better artists than most men,” Ender writes. “Not like morally but spiritually and factually.”
Ten
The present is prettier, and not only because Ender has been harmonizing with Carr. (As I type this, all delay-related tensions seem to be at ease: “My best friend and myself,” a recent Instagram post is captioned, with Ender and Carr pictured together. “We just recorded 12 new songs for an album.”) He has also clamored for a healthier harmony with himself, and more so, the world around him—namely, the winding trails and waterfalls of Western Mass, where he shot disturbing music videos as a teenager, and now hikes and collects crystals. “I don’t really watch TV or movies at all,” he said. “I get headaches from screens. I also think TV and movies are mediocre.” (Another reason, perhaps, for the holdup: “Ruvi gets these crazy headaches,” Carr had told me, earlier. “That’s stopped him from looking at computer screens. And that’s part of why I’ve had to be really patient.”) He goes on long, meandering walks, reads books (currently: a Miles Davis biography for a UMass course), and tinkers furtively with unfinished projects—among them, an umpteenth EP with LUCY (Cooper B. Handy), and several of the roving files he had emailed me. If you ask him about his lightning-quick minor blues improvisations, or his acquired skill at the chessboard, he will tell you, dismissively, that he is “fake good… I don’t really know what I’m doing.” In some ways, maybe, “fake good” just as fittingly describes him: diligently recovering, but wounded nonetheless, regardless of how much he dislikes being worried about.
“I think he wants his writing to be more funny than it is dark. He’ll read me something and be like, It’s a joke. And I’ll be like, Where is the fucking joke? This is concerning.”
We had gotten in the car a little after 10, midway through a rollicking set by the Brooklyn band Prophet Thaddeus. Ender was parked underneath a bridge. He had driven to Bushwick from Massachusetts, and would be driving back, myself briefly in the passenger seat, through the wee hours of the morning—nearly ten total hours on empty roads, gorging blues music, watching trees whiz by. In the arcade, it was balmy: rock music blaring, body-heat bristling. Outside, wind in our faces, we were utterly alone, and it was suddenly, abruptly, silent. Twenty minutes later, stuck at a red light, I asked him about “The Mystery of Livin,” and what he meant by its mantras—that God saw everything, that he was living in sin, and that he was insane. “I’m not a serious sinner and I’m not a Christian, so I don’t really believe in ‘sin’ in the colloquial sense of the word,” he started, after a series of deflections and I-don’t-knows. Later, turning onto the highway, he reflected, somewhat cautiously, on his youth, and the person it has made him into today. “I was not religious at all,” he said, eyes straight ahead. “But some things were kind of undeniable. At some point, you just have to decide what you believe about what’s going on.”
Eleven
At 1:53 AM the morning after Thanksgiving, Ender had texted me links to two “99% true” short stories he had published, under a pseudonym, in a reputable indie press. Ender spends much of his free time writing, and is well-versed in beat poetry. “I think he wants his writing to be more funny than it is dark,” Carr said. “He’ll read me something and be like, It’s a joke. And I’ll be like, Where is the fucking joke? This is concerning.” These stories were not very straightforwardly funny, though maybe, in a sadistic, such-is-life way, they could have been—Raymond Carver-esque, if Carver was a blogger with insurmountable karmic debt. In one, a dazed narrator drolly relived the day of his first literary reading: an unproductive all-nighter, an unproductive drug bender, a spaced-out working session with a friend, and a self-loathing drive down the highway. In another, the same dazed narrator sketched, with cosmic indifference, the quotidian terrors of his haunted home—a bloodied land, forged by genocides and ancestral curses, doomed to inflict its suffering upon lost, suicidal inhabitants. At the end of this story, the speaker mentioned feeling concerned about a close friend. He visited his apartment to find him asleep, the room slightly messier than it had been last time, when it was slightly messier than it had been the time before that.
“If you’re sometimes in this traumatized zone, or dealing with something that feels like it has no resolution… You kind of are forced to think in a new way.”
Ender used to play drums in a metal band. A little after midnight, he found parking—finally—on an emptyish backstreet and connected his phone to Bluetooth. “That’s Simon,” he said, as the vocals came in on a raucous, jaw-clenching stomper. “He sang and played guitar in the band. It’s kind of stoner—like, sludge metal, but also had a death metal, black metal vibe, which I was really into then.” The mixing was scuzzy, as if the entire album—from 2013, when Ender was in high-school—had been recorded into a TASCAM on the floor of a teeny rehearsal space. Simon, the vocalist and guitarist, sounded wise and wounded beyond his years. He had grown up with Ender, and over a decade of tight-knit friendship, introduced him to an eclectic canon: a lot of heavy metal and “harsh” stuff, but also softer sounds, like jazz and improvisational string music. In the fall of 2023, Ender posted a slideshow to Instagram. In one of the slides, there was a screenshot of an iMessage chat: “yoo call me back,” the last message from Ender read, and there was no reply.
“It has a million meanings to it, but at its core, it’s Simon,” Anhedonia said of the moniker SRL, which spells out Simon’s initials. “[Ender] told me everything about Simon. He would show me all these beautiful photos and videos of them—it was really fucking sad. I never met him, but I feel like I knew him.” Not long before our first phone call, Ender had sent a follow-up email, this time with a single attachment: one of several unreleased tracks by Simon, who died of an overdose in 2023, and whose music Ender hopes to someday properly publish. The email featured several long, winding sentences of contextual commentary. I imagined a flustered Ender typing away, trying his best to distill the ongoing project, and its gravity, into an elevator pitch. Weeks later, parked in the car, it was one of those moments where his chipper speech, atonally rushy and meandering, awkwardly belied the grave things at hand. “He was the coolest guy ever, but also a really, really smart person, who really contributed to my development psychologically and in general, too,” he said. “He was very much my emergency contact—he would guide me through everything. So I’ve been a little lost without him.”
Twelve
Ender picks up on the fourth ring, sounding tired. On New Year’s Eve, he had spent an “hour and a half” in New York before road-tripping back to Massachusetts, where he realized, in the wee hours of 2026, that he was coming down with something. This will not be long: I just need the things he texted me about. I can see the story, in a way I originally had not—things I thought were fictional, context that makes this scuzzy music very, very serious. In one of the “99% true” short stories Ender had sent me, the narrator reflected, drily, on a sexual relationship with a substitute teacher. Suddenly, the sickly rapper of “2 Lives,” who sneered “in high school I had sex with my teacher,” was not joking. About that, or a number of other things.
The puzzling thing about Gods Wisdom—and Ruvi Ender, I am realizing—is that he has lived many complex lives, to the point where it feels cartoonish, unbelievable. You almost want to read him as a Frankenstein, a genius aggregator of small-town signifiers and suburban ennui, caricaturing the dark underbelly of Nowhere, USA. The simpler, more unsexy answer: there are no crazy riddles to be solved. And I, who set out to solve a riddle, had overlooked the very plain, clear-as-day things Ender had been saying about a real life, a life he had lived and was still living. “I’m pretty open about everything,” he had casually told me, multiple times, over several months. Why had I kept pretending he was not? Writing about music causes you to seek symbols, subliminal messages. It makes songs like “Again,” which are straightforwardly—if disturbingly—diaristic, labyrinths of complex meta-meanings:
I’m in my bed
For the religious symbolism of the pillows
And like everything
And there’s a door that I walk through to see the Lord
Yeah, I’m walking towards the light
I found God last night
Yeah, meet me at the truck stop at six
Fuck me at the truck stop at six
Earlier on in “Again,” Ender had rapped, nasally and slightly off-beat: “I can see dark things when they approach me.” It had been my favorite Gods Wisdom lyric for several years. Never had it occurred to me that the “dark things,” spiritual and physical, were not aesthetic cudgels, but real troubles: tangible people who had died, tangible nightmares he had seen, tangible predators he had pleasured at truck stops, weighing whether to use the knife in his pocket. A tangible will to walk towards the light, even when the dark things followed—and often still do follow—him there.
And so, I would like Ender to tell me about these dark things. Over the course of an hour, he graciously does: the teacher, the crack dealers, the substance abuse, the near-kidnappings, the near-deaths. Thank you, Ruvi, this is very helpful. May I ask: “When were you at your absolute lowest? How would you describe that period?” He begins to deflect, and I wonder, suddenly, why I so badly want to know, and what narrative purpose the answers would even serve. Stories are redemptive arcs: problem, solution; tension; resolution. They are binaries. I would like to fit this story, of Ruvi Ender, within one: troubled child rapper goes to Hell and re-emerges a prodigious blues pianist. I need to fill in the Hell part. But Ender is no longer there, because of soursop and spirituality and a passion for living things—for waterfalls, for crystals, for ancestors, and for his friends, dead and alive, whose music he would really like for me to hear. “I don’t want to make drugs sound good,” he says, interrupting himself mid-ramble. “There are so many other experiences, too. Being on solo hikes in the winter-time, just on another planet completely, for days at a time. Going on trails and looking at nature and thinking about God and shit. You know what I mean? I had some pretty amazing revelations. I feel lucky to be alive.”
“If you don’t take yourself seriously enough to dress well, God will not bless you.”
Thirteen
Over the phone in November, Ender had used the words “experientially just real” to describe his worldview—not taught or inherited, but accumulated, like dust on a deserted lollipop. Some experiences grant good dust: like the self-presentation philosophy he adopted in Little Haiti, with a benevolent “cult-like” self-healing institution. (“If you don’t take yourself seriously enough to dress well,” he recited, “God will not bless you.”) Other dust is difficult, the way “dust to dust” tends to be. When Ender was much younger, he was devastated by another death, though he prefers that the details be kept private. This, compounded with several other things, demanded that he ask himself grown-up questions from a young age. Some of them continue to linger. “If you’re sometimes in this traumatized zone, or dealing with something that feels like it has no resolution… You kind of are forced to think in a new way,” he said, trailing off, before abruptly asking whether we should take photos.
For a few seconds, the only sound in the car was Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” which was now emanating, faintly, from the radio. Ender has been enjoying Johnson lately—as a legendary blues musician, but maybe also, subconsciously, as a legendary gnostic. “Cross Road Blues” is an ur-text for the nomadic, and its narrator, like many blues narrators, is on a journey: begging God for mercy, not receiving it, and realizing that he must face the darkness alone. By the narrative apex of the song, the troubled “Bob” can see literal nightfall coming, but maybe spiritual nightfall, too:
Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down
Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin’ down
Ender would rather not publicly share the namesake of “Gods Wisdom,” which is much more quotidian than it implies. But as a slight typo, his moniker shares a spiritual disposition with “Bob,” even if decades—and dark worlds—apart. Strip “God’s Wisdom” of its apostrophe, and you are left with a motley plural, “Gods Wisdom,” which is gnostic—multiple understandings, from multiple sources. Definitionally, this dusty-lollipop lifestyle is “secular,” in the original sense of the word: unbound to single authority. And still, where Ender’s early music was garishly, cartoonishly “secular,” it feels survivalist in retrospect, as if that irreverent teenager—with terrible problems of his own—was frantically preparing for “nightfall” himself. On “She’s So Goth,” Ender suggested that you “give your teacher an apple” and “poison that shit,” while on “I Want to Know,” his disillusioned curiosity was more dead-eyed: “Does God pervert judgment? I don’t know. I’d rather kill you than be you, you know?” Years ago, when I first heard these songs, I understood them as satire: surely, this SALEM-era internet rapper was a caricature of something, ingesting the dark tinges of his moment and spitting them out, malformed. This would be true, maybe, if the rule of sacred texts was not double-sided: some sacred texts are actually very funny, and some funny things are actually very sacred. Over the phone, when I asked Ender whether he had been joking at all, he was quick to retort. “That album [Goth] was literally what was going on in my life,” he said, not laughing.
“He’s such a girly-pie type of person. We literally watch Gilmore Girls together and listen to Cece Natalie and shit.”
What exactly is going on now? Half an hour before our first phone call, Ender had sent me several images via text: the waterfall behind his previous apartment (“very important spot”), 10% of his crystal collection (“very important to my well being”), and the John Coltrane hat he wore to the arcade (“I never wear hats I think they’re dumb but I got this one on johncoltrane.com which is a cool place to shop”). Years ago, his visual footprint suggested a banal, uncontacted-tribe existence: bouncing on trampolines, slouching through deserted shopping malls, mowing lawns, driving aimlessly. Today, as one of few veterans of his childhood scene that stuck around, some ennui remains, though the undertones are no longer as foreboding. “He’s literally one of my homegirls,” Anhedonia said. “He’s such a girly-pie type of person. We literally watch Gilmore Girls together and listen to Cece Natalie and shit.” At several points in our first conversation, Ender concluded, after long tangents about his hectic past, that he was “happy with my place of existence—if I died, I would say I had a pretty good life.”
Like his most enduring music, this conclusion—though positive—relies on the tension of negativity: a “good life” matters only when death threatens to end it. I didn’t say it over the phone, but in that moment, I was reminded of “If I Woke Up,” which refracts his construction—not only by inversing “If I died,” but also, the “good life” in question:
Bible on the dash but I went and sold my car
And I’m flying down the highway, I’m a Jesus Superstar
These are all contradictions: The Bible is on the dashboard, and the car, which has actually been sold, is not rolling down the highway but flying, Jesus Christ at the wheel. In the chorus, Ender questions, repeatedly, what world he is in: “I wonder if I woke up,” he groans, over and over again, as if trying to will himself awake by wondering about it. Gods Wisdom, the lyricist, has built an existential funhouse, teeming with conflicting variables and half-starts that mirror Ruvi Ender, the person’s, current praxis: of “waking up” to life by questioning what it has given him. Of course, this life-knowledge is an asymptote: “life,” for Ender, is never necessarily singular. Not when he is on-stage, inhabiting many lives, or with Carr, rapping about “2 Lives,” or by himself, recovering from the hectic life he almost lost. “Gods” is plural, not possessive. Wisdom might be, too: the fleeting “future,” the “disturbing” past, and the present we can never fully have, flying down the highway, doing 75 in a 35.
Fourteen
The song “Negative Creep,” from Goth, begins with a brief exchange between cartoonish, snotty voices. “Are you being sarcastic?” the first voice sneers, between obnoxious guffaws. “Are you being sarcastic, dude?”
“I don’t even know anymore,” the second voice says.
