“Antennae tuned to super slow package transfers. Accumulating for the first years of Lua’s existence. Looming and brewing. Applying silent entropy and a slow pressure to my logic circuits. Seeping slowly, finding their way to the speaker cones. Densely packed with information. Clearly important, but also unclear. A rigorous scenario through a different pair of ears. Uncompromising and beautiful, weird and thrilling. A promise of new understandings, through 8 resonant states of being. This is some kind of human audio, compromised by its strange hardware constraints. On record we have a system of explorations, but in terms of anything but the track, it seems distant, detached, almost wrong. We are sitting on the same shores. Exploring common landscapes through different ears. Error is information. All attention to detail.” (clang)

The first stages of songwriting took place in early 2014, with the conception of the barest melodies, lyrical ideas, and vocal hooks. Over an intense week that summer, Eric and Jeff fleshed out the majority of the songs and recorded a few basic tracks – drums, guitar, Wurlitzer, and electric bass – though these skeletons only hinted at their final shapes. The album was built in fits and starts thereafter, with new elements added every season or two. The song structures were mostly completed by early 2016 when they recorded Sven and Ben’s guest spots, though the duo took a break from working on this album to finish their collaboration project with Gregory Taylor, Brocades & Palimpsests, which was released that summer. Jeff restarted construction on this material in 2017, and the addition of a Moog Model D invigorated the songs with a rich new character. Both Eric and Jeff added glitched, electronic layers to enliven the soundscape thereafter, and the album finally began to take shape.

Bell Monks was formed in 2005 by Jeff Herriott and Eric Sheffield as an outlet for a bunch of unused musical sketches that Jeff had lying around. Eric Sheffield is a musician, maker, and collaborator focused on physical computing, interactive multimedia, and augmented non- traditional instruments.” (Clang)

Bell Monks @ Clang

Was der Chilene hier mit Synthesizern, Sequencern und diversen Geräten für Loops und Effekte hinbekommt, hat in all seinem retrolastigen Computersound auch eine rituell anmutende Seite, denn die wellenförmige Brandung der kernigen und oft sehr plastisch gestalteten Sounds könnte trancehafter kaum sein, und am Ende der gut zwanzig Minuten ist man fast etwas enttäuscht, dass Benkho keine Lust hatte, einen Longplayer daraus zu machen. Man hat keine andere Wahl und lässt die EP ein weiteres mal rotieren oder goutiert das herausragende „Under the Sands of Pisagua“ in Endlosschleife.

Bisweilen erinnern die Sounds an retro-futuristisch aufbereitete asiatische Musik, und kurz vor dem Ausklang mag man sich an Rohrblattinstrumente aus dem Mittelalter oder dem vorderaiatischen Kulturraum erinnert fühlen. Meine Highlights: Die stöhnenden und grunzenden Stimmen in dem völlig ohne Trompeten auskommenden „The Trumpets of the Puma“ – selbstredend sind sie simuliert – und v.a. (ich erwähnte es bereits..) das Stück „Under the Sands of Pisagua“, dessen monumentale Synthies tollen Melodien hinbekommen und zum Schluss in lupenreinen Noise münden. (U.S.)

Label: Clang