The Beat My Head Hit

LP

2023

Ltd.500

Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need

But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities—a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there—are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed

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