This sounds harsh, but I mean it as the utmost compliment: I sometimes can’t tell if ANSWERS is idiotic or genius, and frankly, that tension is what keeps me captivated (and truthfully, it’s much closer to the latter). Ben Bennett makes music that refuses to behave. His new album, ANSWERS, mostly left me with questions. It’s a wild ride, a scattered sonic playground that begins to reveal itself the further I lean in. Sounds take on physical forms, squelching like underwater bellows, scraping out secret codes in brittle concrete, or twisting inside miniature resonances. Bennett records these pieces in a way that doesn’t just feel close, it feels ingrained. Scattered rhythms dry up and evaporate, but the traces never really leave. The whole thing feels like Bennett has discovered something essential by committing fully to what most people would simply dismiss.
Ben heads out on tour next month with Chicago-based composer, Kieran Daly:
Nov 5 Baltimore – Red Room
Nov 6 Hartford, CT – Trinity College Chapel
Nov 7 Greenfield, MA – Looky Here
Nov 8 Portland, ME – Open Systems Studios
Nov 9 Montreal TBA
Nov 10 Boston – NonEvent
Nov 11 Kingston – Tubby’s
ANSWERS is OUT NOW on Lobby Art. He can be found via his website HERE.
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What’s your first memory of being fascinated by a sound that wasn’t supposed to be music? Were there particular spaces as a kid where you felt like sound worked differently? Places where you’d go just to listen?
I don’t recall any early memories of this sort, however, the first music that I can remember getting into was a Little Richard cassette that my dad had. I would listen to it over and over again and spaz out. Once in my elementary school music class, my teacher, Mrs. Jefferson, asked some question about music which I can’t remember, but I raised my hand and when she called on me, I stood up and belted out a whole chorus of “You keep a-knockin’ but you can’t come in…” That got the whole class riled up, but Mrs. Jefferson was super cool about it, and she later had the whole class singing it together, and dancing, too.
So, the fifteen-minute “yeah” video referenced in the album description feels like such a pure commitment to something most people would abandon after thirty seconds. What kept you going? Was there a moment when it transformed from an idea into something else entirely?
If you give yourself some parameters, no matter how limited they might initially seem, your options and your experience within them will expand indefinitely to fill any amount of allotted time. You need sameness in order to perceive difference. You could dedicate your whole life to saying “yeah” in different ways, and you would never exhaust all the possibilities, and furthermore, saying “yeah” would then become a rich framework through which you would experience and understand reality.
How do you usually begin when you’re creating? Do you start with an intention, or do you let the materials guide you toward something unexpected?
There’s a dialogue between ideas and material; I might have ideas about sounds that could be made, what materials to use, and how to use them; the materials usually behave somewhat differently than my idea; my ideas then become informed by how the materials behave, and so on. It doesn’t matter so much whether I begin with an idea or by following the material, because those things ideally change each other, maybe to the point of merging. Rather than beginning, it usually feels more like continuing – picking up where I left off.
There’s something about your work that suggests you’re comfortable with failure, or at least with sounds that might not “work.” How do you navigate that territory between experimentation and something worth sharing?
There’s a question of how wide or narrow you leave the aperture of control.
The sounds and forms that I’m drawn to have some inherent instability to them, meaning I tend to leave the aperture pretty wide. In order to allow for the possibility of discovering something new and interesting, I’m also allowing for the possibility of things just sounding like shit. And quite often they do sound like shit, and I don’t mean in a good way. I mean, in a totally irredeemable and embarrassing way.
The album title, ANSWERS, suggests you’re responding to something. What were the questions that led you to make this record?
The song titles are kind of like Jeopardy!, where you’re given the answer but you don’t know the question. Sometimes I hear my neighbors through the wall watching Wheel of Fortune, and all I hear is them shouting out a word or phrase without any clues.
Does ANSWERS feel complete to you, or is it more like a document of a particular moment in an ongoing investigation?
Just a document of a particular moment. I can’t really listen to it without cringing, because in the time between recording it and it coming out (about a year and a half), I think and hope that I’ve gotten some of those techniques, which were quite fresh at the time of recording, under more control and integrated into a more intentional formal sensibility.
The press materials mention “survival in the empty field.” I’m drawn to this phrase because your work seems to find life in spaces others might consider barren. What does survival mean in your practice? And what grows in these empty spaces you create?
I can see why people might associate my music with survival, but it wouldn’t be my first choice of metaphors, because it implies something done out of acute material necessity, which is not the case (although occasionally I play a really shitty live set and I feel like I’m just trying to “survive” my own playing). Some years ago, I was (and to a much lesser extent am still) involved in primitive skills circles – building and sleeping in bark shelters in the woods, foraging and eating roadkill deer, etc. People associate these things with survivalism, which Americans are increasingly obsessed with in the last decade or so, as evinced by the slew of reality TV shows, etc. But for myself and the friends I practice these things with, it has never been about survival, nor motivated by fear of societal collapse, but out of a more positive spirit of experimentation with how you can meet your needs while contributing less to the giant death machine, and having a hell of a lot of fun with your friends in the process. To not simply accept the current structures out of convention, but to fundamentally question what is actually necessary and meaningful, this opens up worlds of possibility. Maybe to some, making things in the “empty field” looks like austerity, but to me, this is exuberance.
Do you ever miss playing conventional drums, or does that feel limiting now?
I still play conventional drums in my basement, but rarely in public. I don’t feel like schleppin’ those big boys. A jazz ride cymbal is the sound of money. If you want to hear me swing, you’ll have to pay dearly.
I have to ask about that phrase “the big ol’ cosmic sewer from which we were all conjured.” There’s something both irreverent and profound about that image. How do you balance taking your work seriously while maintaining that kind of cosmic humor about existence itself?
Yes, that’s more of Jon’s illustrative metaphysics. There’s an audio recording of Shunryu Suzuki addressing his sangha, who have been meditating for days on end, where he says, “The difficulty you experience will continue… forever.” There’s a very long silence before everyone cracks up into a deep laughter.
And to close, as ever, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Thousands of wood frogs spawning and quacking like a bunch of little ducks in a Pennsylvania pond, the dawn chorus of songbirds punctuated by the distant gobbling of wild turkeys in a North Carolina swamp, the slurping of a bombilla in a mate gourd; also, the screams that foxes make evoke a kind of cute existential pain to me.
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