Thursday, October 8, 2020

Marina Rosenfeld & Ben Vida – „Leaving”, world premiere @ Skaņu Mežs



Leaving is a generative four-loudspeaker
composition created for Skaņu mežs
 by Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida,
who perform as a duo and have recorded two
albums in recent years, Feel Anything and Vertice. 
Drawing from both records as well as a remote
performance that was filtered through the
empty volume of New York’s Fridman Gallery
during the hot summer of the city’s Covid-19
quarantine, Leaving is the artists’ meditation
on the absence and presence, fragmentation
and drift of our present reality, “a strange dialogue,
dreaming of each other through communication
of another order…”

(Francois Bonnet, on Vertice, 2020).  

www.skanumezs.lv

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

New Ep on Superpang








Musique concrète recorded in Shady, New York, Summer 2020. 
Computer, Hardware, Mixing Console. 
Bird Show (ASCAP) 2020

credits

released August 3, 2020 

design: Joe Gilmore

license


Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Out Now! Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida: Vertice






New York’s Fridman gallery re-activates its record imprint with this absorbing collaboration between Ben Vida (fresh from his stunning 4 hour 'Reducing The Tempo To Zero’ opus for Shelter Press), and noted composer for dance, Marina Rosenfeld - whose collaborative album with Warrior Queen and Okkyung Lee 'P.A. / HARD LOVE’  is to this day one of the most brilliantly singular LP’s we’ve stocked. RIYL Jim O’Rourke, Laurie Spiegel, Terre Thaemlitz, Rashad Becker.
Working in the space between improvisation, sculpture, sound installation, and experimental composition, both artists’ skill for creating highly descriptive yet elusive sound structures is at its illusive and ephemeral best across both pieces, from the strangely penetrative metaphysical point of view explored in ‘Any Landscape’, to the sprawling tendrils and searching electronic filament of ‘Branches’ that feel like the process of mycelium or spores finding a way into the cracks between the decayed concrete, glass and steel of crumbling urban environments. 
Drawing on decades of combined experience, ‘Vertice’ unfolds along two 20 minute pieces with a natural grasp of more delicate sounds opening out in vast imaginary spaces. Their palette of field recordings, vocals, keys and electronics is placed at the service of an elusive underlying schematic, snipping away at the ligature of logic until their sounds are released into space as clusters of animated insectoid patterns. It resembles patches of gently overgrown vegetation, like rooftop gardens or thickets of mossy growth overhead.
In scale and fractured design, it comes to describe a vertiginous sense of detachment from reality, probing and challenging the listener’s proprioceptive senses with cool but heady arrangements of free-floating, aerial, and seemingly unmetered tones and dabs of vocal that appear to describe a slow and purposeful movement above and around our architectural surroundings.


https://boomkat.com/products/vertice

https://fridmangallery.bandcamp.com/album/vertice





Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Interview in Self-Titled Mag





                                                         self-titledmag.com

Always Already in New York w/YarnWire and Nina Dante



As part of a series of celebratory events at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum theater, Thursday, March 12th, ISSUE presents the New York premiere of Always Already, a new commissioned work by Ben Vidaperformed by renowned quartet Yarn/Wire, vocalist Nina Dante, and Vida himself. Previously both ISSUE Artists-In-Residence, this is the first ever collaborative project between Vida and Yarn/Wire. The evening also features the ISSUE debut of New York based composer Aaron David Ross (ADR), presenting new compositions from his unreleased Filter Failure song cycle, accompanied by self-made animations.
Always Already is a text based composition for electronics, voice and ensemble. It is a hypnotic examination of the materiality of language that emphasizes the rhythm of speech through repetition and variation. Composed and performed by Ben Vida with Nina Dante and Yarn/Wire, this new work expands on the compositions for small vocal ensembles which Vida has presented at such venues as the Kitchen and BAM. 
Always Already is the first of these pieces to include live instrumentalists. Keyboards, marimbas, electronics and voices are braided together to produce a mesmerizing ramble of language and notes. The works abstract narrative was developed out of a dense cyclical text which was inspired by the rhythmical essays of Gertrude Stein, the Gysin/Burroughs cut-up method and the parsing systems of the Conceptual Writers. 

IPR

Always Already in Chicago w/ YarnWire and Nine Dante




Ben Vida premieres his new text-based composition for electronics, voice and ensemble. Always Already is a hypnotic examination of the materiality of language that emphasizes the rhythm of speech through repetition and variation.
Composed and performed by Vida with Yarn/Wire and Nina Dante, this new work expands on his other compositions for small vocal ensembles, which he has presented at Lampo, The Kitchen and BAM.

Always Already is the first of these pieces to include live instrumentalists. Keyboards, marimba, electronics and voices are braided together to produce a ramble of language and notes. The work’s abstract narrative was developed out of a dense cyclical text, which was inspired by the rhythmical essays of Gertrude Stein, the Gysin/Burroughs cut-up method, and the parsing systems of the Conceptual Writers.


Lampo

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Reducing the Tempo to Zero

Boomkat Product Review:

Shelter Press cap 2019 with a steeply hypnotic, four hour long immersion into the liminal boundaries of Ben Vida’s digital and analog synthesis - one of the most immersive and moving releases we’ve heard this year and an unmissable trip for followers of Eliane Radigue, Dennis Johnson, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman or anyone who fell deep into Jim O’Rourke’s recent, similarly epic 'To Magnetize Money And Catch A Roving Eye’ set.
Ben Vida’s first solo release in three years finds him fully consumed by ideas on perceptions of time, grain and tone. In four glacial movements he commits a vast array of dematerialised drones which, while ostensibly minimalist, are rich with sonic phenomena and granular details that become apparent with focussed listening. The work is the result of Vida’s own daily practice involving deep, sustained listening processes, as he strives to achieve the rarified effects evoked by seminal minimalist works from the ‘60s to the ‘90s which, like this one, combine ideas from maths and non-Western tunings with the tireless capacities of electronics to highlight the most intimate and elemental sonic phenomena and manifest their transcendental nature with meditative effect. 
Perhaps the best metaphor for this sound is the idea that still waters run deep. The oceanic scale of the album mirrors a rich sense of inner life to Ben Vida’s music, highlighting through its glacial developments the paradoxical relationships between perceptions of macroscopic density and granular, nanoscopic detail that draws the ear between the concrete, discrete and ephemeral nature of his sounds. While rich in detail, the piece gets really interesting in its transitions between the tidal swells of its many parts, when the diffracted flow results in strange, ear-probing junctures of sonic phenomena and arcing harmonic formations begin to reveal themselves in monumental events.
A challenging amount of endurance is required to follow the full shape of ‘Reducing The Tempo To Zero’, but once caught in its temporality the effect is remarkable, recalling to our minds the character in Ballard’s ‘Myths of The Near Future’ who suffers from delusions that he’s an astronaut, and who begins to perceive a loosening of the boundaries between past, present and future amid the shimmering golden light of Florida. Swap space for the ocean, and the ocean for inner space, and Vida’s sonorous 4 hours of swimming sound have the capacity to supply a overwhelming subjective experience for those with an open imagination and precious spare time on their hands to get better acquainted with their own grasp of time. One or the holidays then.

buy it here:  RTTTZ

Sunday, March 31, 2019

SYG Tracks


                                         
All Tracks: Ben Vida, 2019 
Sources Include: Tanzanie. Masumbi. Musique De Divertissement Wagogo; Nouvelle-Guinee. Les Papous Chasseurs de Tetes; Music of the Berta from the Blue Nile; Musique Gbaya; Orchestre Et Lithophones Kabiye; Ethiopia. Ari Polyphonies. 

Link: radio.syg.ma

Thursday, January 31, 2019

TECHNOSPHERE MAGAZINE





“Heteroglossia” describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single language. In Ben Vida’s composition Heteroglossic Riot, software reads text scores, which in turn drive the synthesis of synthetic speech and abstract sound. Through the interplay and disparity between text, speech, and sound, Vida points to the idiosyncratic possibilities offered by computationally assisted translation.

                                                                 Heteroglossic Riot








Saturday, December 8, 2018

New Release: Marina Rosenfeld/Ben Vida - Feel Anything






Fractal, electro-acoustic improv from NYC’s Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida, conjuring a steeply layered investigation of proprioception and dreamtime psyches...
Marking Marina’s first appearance since the resoundingly unusual electro-dub of her ‘P.A. / Hard Love’ [Room 40, 2013] recordings with Warrior Queen, and also Ben Vida’s follow-up to ‘Damaged Particulates’ [Shelter Press, 2016], their probing collaboration is a wicked exercise in vivid, abstract terraforming.
As they both hail from NYC, it’s possible to hear the 8 parts of ‘Feel Anything’ as a gyring, topographical reading of their environment. In bifurcating formations they strafe and wind thru varying densities of tone and space in sloshing meter, scaling the listener’s focus from vertiginous showers of sparky electronic scree to demolished string orchestrations and wide, abyssal bass in fractious permutations.
We can instantly recognise some of Marina’s signature, eerie dub touches carried over from her ‘P.A. / Hard Love’ EP, but here they are unsettled, unstuck by Vida’s nervy tics and persistently amorphous electronics until they both effectively form a sort of vaporous free jazz describing the waveform-like outline of urban panoramas and the insectoid scuttle of busy populations, scurrying up and down and thru skyscrapers, subways, lofts and streets.


Monday, April 30, 2018

And So Now at BAM/May 12th, 2018






And So Now

Video Link

https://www.bam.org/visual-art/2018/and-so-now


Composed by Ben Vida
Vocalists:
Nina Dante
Brandon Lopez
Jessica Pavone
Ben Vida
BAM is pleased to present a new experimental work by Ben Vida that examines the aural threshold between verbal sense and nonsense. Featuring a quartet of vocalists, And So Nowoscillates between the phonetic and the linguistic; at times the tempo and rhythm of the speech lifts the language outside the realm of communication, shifting it into pure sound. Cyclical singing is juxtaposed with spoken monologues foregrounding the material aspects of language. As the vocalists exchange words and phrases, a narrative develops, revealing how the communicative “signal to noise” ratios have fallen out of balance. Accompanying the vocalists is a soporific bed of electronically synthesized audio. This lattice of voices and electronics acts to create a mesmerizing aural experience.
Inspired by the text sourcing methods used in John Cage’s Diary and Thomas Bernhard’s Voice Imitator, the rhythmical essays of Gertrude Stein and the parsing systems of the Conceptual Writers movement, the verbal score of And So Now references a history of experimental writing.

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Presences Electronic, GRM/INA - Paris, France

Présences électronique de retour à la Maison de Radio France


DIMANCHE 25 MARS 19h00

Jacques LEJEUNE
Mads Emil NIELSEN
Chris CORSANO
Ben VIDA & Marina ROSENFELD
Gravetemple

Thursday, February 1, 2018

The MusraraMix Festival






Performance and Talk: Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society, Musrara
https://www.musraramixfest.org.il


Ben Vida/Marina Rosenfeld Duo





MADEIRADiG Music Festival 2016

Ben Vida: Electronics
Marina Rosenfeld: Turntables




Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Performance: Reducing the Tempo to Zero, Europe









Reducing the Tempo to Zero (Choir)
Sept 29th, 2016

Reducing the Tempo to Zero (Quartet)
Oct 27th, 2016

Reducing the Tempo to Zero (Choir)
Nov 6th, 2016

Performance: Reducing the Tempo to Zero, The Kitchen, NYC







Reducing the Tempo to Zero (Four Hour Version)

Vocalists: Nina Dante, Eleanor Friedberger, Ryan Sawyer and Ben Vida

Oct. 15th, 2016



The Kitchen

Performance: Reducing the Tempo to Zero at LAMPO, Chicago




LAMPO
June 11th, 2016

The Graham Foundation
Madlener House
Reducing the Tempo to Zero is Ben Vida’s new long-form composition for four vocalists and electronics.
Please note, audience members may come and go throughout the near five-hour performance. Guest vocalists include Melina Ausikaitis, Nina Dante and Dan Mohr. Lighting design by Christine Shallenberg.
Informed by Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, the extended performance length of RtTtZ acts to complicate the listeners’ relationship to memory, absorption and attention. The timeline of this piece takes hours to unfurl, which means some audience members may only experience segments of the overall composition; this eliminates basic structural signifiers (like a strict beginning, middle and end) and leaves room for reconsidering how the developmental arc of a composition can function.
As an example of expanded composition, RtTtZ also takes historic cues from works like Stockhausen’s Sternklang and Le Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House. In much the same way those pieces used staging and site specificity as elemental compositional building blocks, RtTtZ uses direct intervention with the gallery space to oscillate between installation and performance. Not only does this prompt a reinterpretation of agency for the audience (both by encouraging them to experience the piece from a number of different locations as well as having them determine their own length of engagement with the work), but, in terms of audience expectation, context and perspective, it also actively sets up a different kind of experiential proposal.

Lampo

Monday, April 18, 2016

Exhibition: [Smile on.] . . . [Pause.] . . . [Smile off.] @ Lisa Cooley Gallery, NYC





                                                       Lisa Cooley Gallery



Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Performance: Ben Vida and Marina Rosenfeld. Fridman Gallery, NYC.


The 2016 New Ear Festival at Fridman Gallery January 6-12, 2016
Fridman Gallery presents the inaugural edition of The New Ear Festival dedicated to sound and performance. This year’s program includes:
Jan. 6 (Wednesday) — Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida
Jan. 7 (Thursday) — Byron Westbrook + Stephen Vitiello and Andrea Parkins
Jan. 8 (Friday) — Leila Bordreuil with Peter Evans, Jaimie Branch and Joanna Mattrey Jan. 9 (Saturday) — Phill Niblock + screening of “The Movement of Phill Niblock” Jan. 10 (Sunday) — Cecilia Lopez, video/sound installation on view 12-8pm
Jan. 11 (Monday) — CT-SWaM:: spatial sound works & talks
Jan. 12 (Tuesday) — Kevin Beasley: Listening Room 

Performances: Rotterdam and Brussels.







▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

BRAUBLFF (Materie und Laut) is a series of live events in collaboration with KRAAK (Gent). Where and how does language transform into music? A possible answer: the point where language loses its meaning and becomes pure matter – by repetition, mutation and deconstruction, made possible by technology, cut-up techniques and tape-manipulation.

The idea for this series of events originated from a shared obsession for the work of vocal poets such as Henri Chopin, Byron Gysin, Lars-Gunnar Bodin, and the Revue OU catalogue.

BRAUBLFF brings together contemporary vocal poets and text-sound composers with the pioneering work of the avant-garde since the 1950s.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Performance: Borderline Festival, Athens, Greece





Slipping Control (Live) Ben Vida w/ Tyondai Braxton and Amirtha Kidambi

Borderline

Exhibition: 356 S Mission Rd, Los Angeles, CA


                                             

                                              Slipping Control (West)
                                                  356 S Mission Rd










Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Performance: Slipping Control at The Kitchen, NYC Jan. 21st





Ben Vida returns to The Kitchen with Slipping Control (ver.3) which examines the connectivity between machine-derived and spoken rhythms. This new iteration focuses on cycling vocal patterns and psychoacoustics all in the service of a rather broken sort of dance music. With Vida on electronics and Tyondai Braxton and Amirtha Kidambi on vocals.
January 21, 8pm
Tickets $15
Music programs are made possible with support from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation. Annual program support in part provided by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.



The Kitchen

Monday, November 24, 2014

Performance: Ben Vida presents Tracers (Santeria) at the Guggenheim Dec 12th, 2014


Join us for an after-hours private viewing of current exhibitions, including ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s which the New York Times calls “an extraordinary accomplishment.” Once the general public has left for the day, the museum’s landmark building will fill with the sounds of a live performance by Ben Vida featuring new compositions of Santeria-inspired rhythms transformed into synthesized music.
Ben Vida is a New York–based artist and composer. He has been an active member of the international experimental music community for two decades with a long list of collaborators, bands, and releases to his credit. In the mid 90ʼs he cofounded the group Town and Country and has since worked as a solo artist with releases on such labels as PAN, Alku, Shelter Press, and Kranky. He has presented works in a range of museums, galleries, and music venues including MoMA, The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, ICA London, Audio Visual Arts, Lisa Cooley Gallery, Leap Gallery Berlin, The Artistʼs Institute, and the Sydney Opera House.
The evening also includes a playlist selected by Zach Layton with songs by artists such as Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Can, Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Neu!, and more.

Free for members, $20 general admission. Buy tickets online or by credit card at the door.*
Cash bar serves wine and beer. Guests wishing to purchase alcoholic beverages will be asked for a photo ID.
Want to skip the line and get in free? Become a member today to enjoy priority access to enjoy this after-hours viewing and other exclusive events.

Performance: Bloopers #1 at EMPAC







Bloopers #1

Michael Bell-Smith, Sara Magenheimer, + Ben Vida

DECEMBER 6, 2014

Bloopers #1 is the newest iteration of the performance-driven 
collaboration by artists Michael Bell-Smith, Sara Magenheimer, 
and Ben Vida. Using the language of “breakdowns,” or comedic 
outtakes, the artists blend props, video, and electronic music to 
play with the social power of different kinds of media.
Presenting a joyously subversive take on popular culture and 
the social connections produced through sound and music, 
Bloopers #1 takes the question “Why do we hate some objects 
and love others?” as its starting point, and uses set pieces, 
dance-pop, cinematic cliché, and live performance to 
playfully tease the boundaries of language, crowds,
 and the nature of things that draw them.
CURATOR: 


VICTORIA BROOKS


















empac

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Performance: Unsound Festival, Krakow






Ben Vida is an experimental musician working with sound frequencies, psychoacoustics and audio illusions. He is also interested in instrument construction and its improvisational or autocompositional capabilities. Vida releases his work on Pan, Shelter Press and Autumn Records, among others. In Krakow, Vida will present “Damaged Particulates”. Commissioned for Unsound Festival New York, this piece makes use of an external sound system as well as SubPacs, a vibrating audio system that directly channels low frequencies to the body.

unsound

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Performance/Screening: LEAP Gallery, Berlin



Ben Vida presents 'Damaged Particulates' in Berlin

Opening: Friday 10.10.2014, 19.00
Artist Talk moderated by Lisa Blanning 

+ Subpac Presentation by Thomas Bäz (Subpac Partner Development Germany) 19:00
Tickets: http://bit.ly/1tdOSLj
Info: https://www.facebook.com/events/519748671488702/


Plus an exhibition of Ben Vida's video Slipping Control.


leap knecht

Friday, August 8, 2014

New Release: Slipping Control LP on Shelter Press





Slipping Control
by Ben Vida
SP038


Technical
21 tracks
35:37 min
12′ LP / 33 rpm
2014
first edition of 500 copies
color cover + printed inner sleeve + double sided insert 
140gr black vinyl


More Info:
Shelter Press

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Opening: Aug 7th Lisa Cooley Gallery, NYC




Fia Backström
Julien Bismuth
Michael Dean
Ryan Gander
James Hoff
Susan Howe
Christopher Knowles
Sophia Le Fraga
Rick Myers
Research Service
Aram Saroyan
Imogen Stidworthy
Sue Tompkins
Ben Vida
Performances by Fia Backström, Ben Vida, and Research Service (Avi Alpert, Mashinka Firunts, and Danny Snelson) will take place during the course of the exhibition, on the 21st and 28th of August

Lisa Cooley
107 Norfolk Street
New York, New York 10002