Ben Wildenhaus - Instrumental Quaalude (podcast)

Reçu un mail de Benjamin Wildenhaus / Received a mail from Benjamin Wildenhaus:

I had been composing the instrumental music and structures for the post-rock band Federation X when I started to explore improvisation and loose structure through country music, Arabic music, and other traditional and experimental musics.
I continue to record and perform in Brooklyn, NY using a variety of instruments: fretted string instruments, keyed instruments, pedal steel, etc.
These are the things that interest me as a performer/recorder:
0) the product of all instruments is some noise. It is always different.
1) creating 'folk' melodies that will be disbursed in various musical settings until the author is no longer known.
2) exploring the imagined realm of the musical Orient that the west has created. This music has no relation to music from asian or middle eastern regions, instead stemming from the French image, "Kradoudja, ma maitresse," and the American image from Ellingtonia, "Caravan."
3) playing quietly and creating useful music. Performance venue behavior is predictable and useless: audience watch the performer; performer perform. The expectation forces the performer to make choices maybe he or she should not. Allow room for gradual musical/sonic development or disintegration and for subtle physical encroachment of sound within the performance space.
4) intricate or deliberate compositions and recordings are for physical mediums such as vinyl, cd, cassette. Incidental recordings, improvisations, and composition fragments are for fluid, disposable mediums like the mp3 or podcast.
The podcast Instrumental Quaalude is an effort to capture such incidental recordings, improvisations, and composition fragments as they happen. There is too much music available on the internet for a listener to successfully collect and preserve. The mp3s delivered through this podcast are disposable, to be heard once, to be useful only in the moment of their capture and their release, their recording and playback. Then they recede into the annals of internet hell, alienated from virality by a lack of clicks.

Little selection of his works:

"Week Twenty-seven": Piano plays a 4/4 chordal backing. Destructed sine waves ruin accordion melody. Bass enters to compliment the piano while the sine waves attempt to ruin everything. For Johanne Fück. (4 minutes, 12 seconds).

"Week Nineteen": Week Nineteen first oscillates between Dbm/Ab and Abm/E. In the bridge the chords Ebm7/Db, Gm, Db/Gb repeat before returning to the previous two chords. There is also a melody. Performed by SG. (5 minutes, 10 seconds)

"Week One": The decaying tones of the SG provide the repetition for slipping pedal steel notes. Performed by showbud pedal steel and SG electric guitar. (5 minutes, 13 seconds).

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