Heavy duty uncoated jacket w/ OBI and liner notes
I often think about a video that Ben made in the mid-2000s, shot in profile with his shadow cast on a dimly lit Ohio punk house wall. In the video, Ben emits, intones, and then barks “yeah” relentlessly for an uninterrupted fifteen minutes. He pushes his reedy, anonymous voice—which in conversation conveys a kind of gentle bemusement—into guttural terrain that flirts with overtone singing (or screeching). The gesture feels raw and spontaneous, suspended in a vacuum.
The video has echoes of late ’60s and early ’70s American performance art—Bruce Nauman’s Lip Sync, Paul McCarthy’s Ma Bell—but Ben is not building a persona or engaging in clever language games. He pushes straight into the realm of pure sound, teasing out subtle variations from a barebones fragment of reckless affirmation—or maybe sarcasm—using democratic tools: his voice and a single, quintessentially American interjection that barely qualifies as language. It is obvious how much pleasure Ben takes in the act of listening. He punctuates the performance with silences, burrowing into the room’s resonance, which seems to surprise and delight him. Distilled to its simplest form, Ben transforms the utterance into an act of destructive glee that carries no trace of angst. Over time, his unwavering commitment to a stupid and very human endeavor becomes a devotional ritual that collides with the divine, without relying on a religious object.
On ANSWERS (all-caps notwithstanding), Ben modestly continues to offer profound “answers” to questions about survival in the empty field. The actions it contains are not extreme; it operates at a relatively low dynamic, neither at the edge of inaudibility nor at the volume of inflammatory rage-bait. Microscopic but still visible, the sounds suggest the early stirrings of new, dumb lifeforms. ANSWERS is provocative in its lack of ornament—born of the post-industrial and natural worlds, hovering above quotidian realities. Ben continues to operate on the edge of not being aesthetic at all—subject dissolving into object—plumbing the nature of reality with his homespun spring-steel idiophone and coffee-can aerophone, until it verges on bathroom drainage.
As a percussionist, Ben has a lithe touch, moving seamlessly between sticks and his bare hands. Like Toshi Makihara and Sean Meehan, Ben is concerned with friction, yet his work is closer in spirit to Kieran Daly’s slowly unfolding monophonic MIDI investigations, which balance formal rigor, a cultivated openness to “dumbness,” and an abstract connection to the jazz tradition.
My favorite moments on Answers are when the boundary between music and non-music becomes unstable, and when Ben abandons the drums and “music” entirely—"How you sound when you’re criticizing me,” “Me when I’m having some work done,” and “Toroid – like a bagel or a donut”—where the album’s harsh plainness gives way to austere beauty, as if the vacuum momentarily ruptured.
ANSWERS feels as though it unfolds in isolation, yet the faintest vapors of the detritus, dust, and rubble of recognizable worlds drift in, giving rise to sounds that evoke goose honks, rapier blades, and field recordings from a Home Depot loading dock. Ben displays extraordinary sensitivity to vibrations that bloom briefly, then vanish. The record closes with twenty seconds of silence, a quiet void where everything disappears. It simply ends, draining back into the big ol’ cosmic sewer from which we were all
conjured.
- Jonathan Pfeffer
