Demo Recordings of New Work
OSGF
Meltwater
Machine in the Garden
Hadley
Arterial II
Anorak
Q&A With Ben Cosgrove
Where have you been the past few months?
Ordinarily, I spend virtually all of my time on the road, so it’s a real happy coincidence that I happened to have arranged to spend this spring subletting the apartment of a friend of mine in Northampton, Massachusetts. My performance schedule was getting denser and denser, though, and in the weeks leading up to the pandemic – even as recently as early March – I’d been kicking myself for taking this place on, thinking that I’d never get a chance to spend any time here. It’s funny now to think of how extremely wrong I was.
Western Massachusetts really does turn out to be the perfect sort of place to be during a time like this in a lot of ways: Northampton is a very small city, so it’s not as risky, scary, or alienating as places like Boston, New York, and even Portland have been during this time. It’s a small convolution of buildings and pavement surrounded by fields and forests, with small pathways of all sorts spooling out into and between them, and I’ve found it very easy to wander off into these surprisingly vast and wild places for large chunks of every day without encountering other people. At the same time, I’ve had a much stronger sense of community than I might have in a more isolated, rural place, so it’s felt to me like a pretty magical balance.
Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?
I've devoted my career over the last decade or so to writing and performing instrumental music about landscape, place, and environment. I'm fascinated in particular by the ways our unconscious reactions to different physical environments contribute to the development of a sense of place, and by the ways in which those basic responses -- for instance, disorientation, claustrophobia, familiarity, loneliness, comfort, vulnerability, and exhilaration -- can make different landscapes such fruitful and instructive metaphors for so many other parts of the human experience. I’ve written music about the delirious and disorienting thrill of driving across the plains for the first time, about the sense of isolation felt on a wilderness island, and even recorded a whole album called Salt that articulated the emotional arc of recovery from loss in the form of ten songs about different landscapes characterized by flux, unpredictability, and impermanence. Recently, I've also been very interested in the influence that motion and travel can have on our feelings of home, place, and regionality, and how wild and constant movement – musically or geographically – can still yield discrete patterns, moments, and impressions that you can’t really perceive in stasis.
I've stuck to these themes for years in part because I personally find environmental history and landscape studies to be inexhaustibly interesting and creatively animating, but also because I hope and believe that inviting people to consider their emotional responses to different landscapes can inspire them to manage their local, regional, national, and global environments with greater attention, care, and thoughtfulness. It helps me to feel useful when I can attach my music to the real world in ways that feel helpful and productive to me.
What creative projects are you currently working on?
While the relative seclusion that COVID-19 has imposed has been troubling and inconvenient in a few obvious ways -- I've lost my income for the foreseeable future, for instance -- it has also dovetailed with my current work in a way that's been oddly convenient. I'd lately grown troubled by the realization that so much of my music is about explicitly "natural" environments, and that so much of each show I played involved me raving about things like wilderness areas and national parks; I worried that this might encourage a view of nature and wildness -- ie. that they are pure and separate things disconnected from normal human life -- that I don’t actually support or believe in. Lately I’ve been focusing on writing music about places where wildness and the built environment kind of elide with each other: overgrown highway underpasses, plants in sidewalk cracks, lawns, gardens, and other places where the natural and non-natural are harder to pull apart from each other. In the new music I’m working on, I hope to present nature as something of which people are an active, dynamic part, not something exotic that we must leave our normal lives to go witness. I think the fetishization of classically beautiful wilderness spaces isn’t a particularly helpful thing for the world, and I’d like to feel I could help people appreciate the smaller, less obvious expressions of nature and wildness that show up in their own lives. In a weird and unexpected way, by making me slow down from the usual frantic pace I move at when I'm on the road performing, the COVID-19 quarantine has helped me pivot away from thinking about the sweep of huge landscapes and force myself to focus instead on these smaller, everyday, under-your-nose things and slowly work out how best to compellingly write music about them.
How has your artistic practice changed during this time?
It’s been great having time that I can spend writing, rather than devoting so much of my life to racing around performing – normally I work out new material by playing evolving versions of it onstage each night and waiting to see where it ends up, but this has allowed me to be a little more cerebral about how this music should be shaped. It’s also affected my playing style in a weird way: slowing down a little bit in my life seems to have resulted in a similar effect on the music I’m writing, which is less note-dense and a little more blocky and rhythmic than what I’ve done in the past.
Has COVID-19 shifted how you think about the natural world?
Yes! It’s compelled me to burrow more deeply into the place I’m in, rather than looking at a landscape as broadly as I can to try and understand it. I’m used to trying to grapple with the broad sweep of a geographical scene, rather than zeroing in on the tiny moments and relationships within it. I think it’s been a healthy shift, in that respect, and I hope that I’ll be able to maintain more of a balance between those two perspectives going forward.
Tell us about the work you submitted for this exhibit.
I’ve been working primarily on writing and recording a new album while here, but the pace of these things is always annoyingly slow, and it will be several months before any of it is able to be fully mixed, mastered, and released. In the meantime, though, I’m sending along five videos of me playing solo versions of a few of these new songs! The titles are not necessarily going to remain the same, and there will doubtless be little adjustments made to the songs themselves too, but here are working drafts of five new tunes (each of which is with the theme I described in response to the 3rd question, above) that I’ve been spending time with lately.