ben zucker
composer, performer, organizer, curator, educator, etc.
Others on Ben (Profiles):
Chicago Reader: "Ben Zucker’s stirring compositions are built on a lifetime of musical curiosity"
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"Currently" feature on Deepest Currents
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Better Know A Weisslich: Ben Zucker
(on neither/n/nor/n and conceptual practices)
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Others on Ben (Reviews):
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("The music feels like a livelier Morton Feldmon, however, Zucker is creating his own sound...")
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("With shades of the seminal Bitches Brew and modern avant-gardists like Tomasz Stanko, Zucker’s work is a testament to the power of restraint and arrangement.)
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("...there’s an immensely contemplative nature to this music, and that quality alone is produced with sufficient strength to result in music made perfect for quiet moments in quiet rooms.)
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("Its slowness, the eery interaction and the shifting focus between foreground and background sounds give the feeling of foreboding and dread.)
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Touching Extremes on Confluere
("...you’re going to appreciate the warm embrace of its unassuming truthfulness.")
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("Zucker’s music speaks – or rather, doesn’t – to the power of permitting the mouth to essentially adopt a state of autonomy from the body and mind, unmoored from the obligation to communicate to anyone, creator included.")
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Twisted Soul on trlksco (worksworn)
("...the result is a spacious fusion of jazz and electronics that slowly unfurls with a measured tempo full of grace and elegance.")
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IMPOSE Magazine on Guharmatar (worksworn)
("The master of improvisation...can relay his emotions clearly, into a musical reality he shapes surreal in the track...”)
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Tome To The Weather Machine on Iridescent Lines of Flight
("...these flights of stereo-panning chordal clusters, 4-on-the-floor beat invite us into a fully formed musical world where Zucker's ideas play themselves out in rich, pulsing expansions and heavily edited fragments stitched togehter to make one of my favorite stand alone singles I've heard all year.")
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Sequenza21 on neither/n/nor/n, performed by the Southland Ensemble
("Neither /N/Nor/N is simple in both materials and structure, yet it proved to be the perfect canvas upon which sonic illusions could be released by the imagination.")
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We Need No Swords on intra.incarn
("Buzzing nano-swarms morph into keening elephantine choirs, then into glowering, vaporous thunder, and so on in constant, slo-mo evolution...
Key to this is the unhurried, naturalistic way in which Zucker shepherds his army of ghost players through these transitions.")
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("...the piece is a haunting trumpet solo, sculpted into an 36 minute ambient gem.")
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Commodity Fetish Records on intra.incarn
("...like the Rite Of Spring slowed down to absolute zero and framing a heavenly progression of events.")
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("Dense structures moving through sharp and piercing sonic planes...")
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(A full-length interview and album preview!)
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(Honorable Mention, Best of the First Half of 2020)
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The Composer's Toolbox on Clarke Distributions
(One of 'Three Composers You Have To Listen To': "...reactive and involved, which is really refreshing and welcome.")
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("Certainly an album worth seeking out if you’re a fan of improvisational jazz, Zucker and company put a very artistic touch on the listen that defies classification, transcends time and fascinates from beginning to end.")
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Contemporary Fusion Reviews on Fifth Season
("Excellent experimental jazz...most highly recommended")
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("remarkable experimental/improvisational ensemble debut...creating fascinating off the beaten path musical conversations")
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Ben on Others:
Coin-Operated Boys: Amanda Palmer’s Grand Theft Orchestra & The Social Economy Of Music
(Published in Pyxis, Wesleyan's humanities journal, on Theatre Is Evil and fandom as an alternative economics.)
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Music Between Sounds: Relational Aesthetics And The Poetics Of Wandelweiser
(My undergrad thesis, using Nicolas Bourriaud, amongst others, to talk about Manfred Werder's 2005/1, amongst others.)
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Review of the 2015 London Contemporary Music Festival for TEMPO Journal
("The concerts on Sunday and Tuesday lasted over three hours; they weren't easy, but they prompted salient experiences...")
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"im in ur discipline, making u music: Jennifer Walshe’s Composition of the Digital Everyday"
(Presentation given at NUNC! 4, April 2021)
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Place as An Extended Technique: The Quarantine Concerts & New Experimental Music Platforms
(On Experimental Sound Studio's online pandemic-era concert series, and the meaning of 'scene' under lockdown and platform capitalism.)
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(On a paradoxical text score by Joseph Kudirka, presented virtually in 2021 and at the University of Buffalo in 2023)
Ben on Ben (writings & projects)
“What Can Be Learned to Be Observed”: Technical and Theoretical Reflections on the Clarke Distributions
(My doctoral dissertation, using one of my open works to discuss language, indeterminacy, and musical works as "containers of practice".)
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Renotations, or, a musical alternative interpretations kit
(A prototype system for re-reading sheet music, develop as part of the 2024 Summer of Protocols cohort)
Others on Others
(A Virtual Commonplace Book):
I say it’s time to attempt fulfilling our mandate as artists here on Earth. I say we work on finding or developing an Underground Railroad that will help people escape, through metaphysical tunnels we construct, this mundane plane of existence. You want to be a defiant member of society? Try defying the laws of nature. Talk about a police state! Clawing for grants and gigs and stature is just playing into the trap. The smug life didn’t choose you. It’s the lowest level. Lower than the lowest level because we are totally misusing our gifts. We are the tricksters, the wizards, the true magicians. And the would-be shamans and healers.
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There is a huge difference between making work inspired by the Divine, making work that reminds one of the Divine, and actually manifesting the Divine. We don’t need faint echoes or foggy mirrors. We need the direct current. We need all lines of communication opened between us and the Universe. We need to break out of here and bring as many along with us as possible. We need to find the resonant frequencies that will crack the walls. The melodies that will pick the locks. The colors and shapes and words and actions that will melt down the barriers and transduce our molecules and take us to the other side.
~David First, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/the-entertainer/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-entertainer
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TO FEEL everything in every way,
To hold all opinions,
To be sincere contradicting oneself every minute,
To annoy oneself with absolute open-mindedness,
And to love things just like God.
~Fernando Pessoa
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You're not musicians, you're tone scientists.
~Sun Ra
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Out of respect for the melody-and the violinist-I am deliberately not notating specific dynamics. I don't want to fix or limit the interpretation. This is "zen", man: it should as simple as a flower. Play as if your life depended on it. It does.
~Peter Garland, notes to Coyote's Bones
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Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.
Art is a true account of the activity of mind. Because consciousness … is always consciousness of something, art thinks ever of the world, cannot not think of the world, could not turn its back on the world even if it wished to. This does not mean that it’s going to be honest as a mailman; it’s more likely to appear as a drag queen.
~Donald Barthelme
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Q. Under what circumstances is a person a composer ?
A. As soon as a person wishes to bring about something which to the best of his knowledge would never happen without him, he embarks on a process of creation. If, in addition to that, his interest lies in putting things together – establishing connections between things – that otherwise would not connect themselves, and if he then connects them in such a way that they now have a meaning and sense that without these connections they did not have, then he is a composer.
~Herbert Brun, from When Music Resists Meaning
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As shocks and surprises make a dent in a spectator's reflexes, so that he is suddenly more open, more alter, more awake, the possibility and the responsibility arise for onlooker and performer like. the instant must be used, but how, what for? Here, we are back to the root question -- what are we searching for anyway?
~Peter Brook, from The Empty Space
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When I am inside writing,
all I can think about is how I should be outside living.
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When I am outside living,
all I can do is notice all there is to write about.
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When I read about love, I think I should be out loving.
When I love, I think I need to read more.
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~Sarah Kay, from The Paradox
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