Ben von Wildenhaus

The Early Days (2007-2010) After 10 years spent deploying sonic barrages with saturnine heavy-riffers Federation X, tinnitus wasn’t the only voice in the back of Ben Wildenhaus’s head. “I had always listened to surf along with garage and punk and all the heavy and angular Olympia stuff,” he says. “But at the same time I was playing and listening to a lot of jazz—Bill Evans, Duke Ellington, Miles, especially electric Miles, and getting weird with experimental stuff.” Languishing in the drowsy college town of Bellingham, WA, those other sounds started speaking in the back of his brain, too. Without Federation X touring or recording on a regular basis, he started playing in every other band in town. “I was playing two or three nights a week in Bellingham, and touring as a sideman. I started to get pretty tired of Americana, Townes and Graham Parsons, bluegrass beard rock, etc. I learned a lot about playing but missed the creating new music.” So he and wife, Tawni, broke the notorious clutches of that town and landed in New York City. “I always felt an attraction to NYC. It’s the closest you can get to world travel without the need for deep pockets. I decided to focus on six-string guitar—in Fed X we used only the four heaviest strings—by playing as much as possible around Brooklyn and composing new music for a podcast called Instrumental Quaalude.” There wasn’t exactly a clamoring commercial demand for Wildenhaus’s new style at first, so he played where he could, whether he was expected or not: “There was this small vegetarian restaurant/cafe down the street from our place called Phoebe’s that hosted random singer-songwriters. One day I asked the bartender if I could play during her shifts. I arrived every Wednesday and, instead of setting up in the front, I’d take a position in the dark back-area, among the boxes of wine and beers and napkins. I’d set my amp to a very low volume and mic it through the house stereo system. Then I’d improvise wallpaper jams for hours in exchange for a meal and booze. "And I wrote a lot of material while improvising there. I also learned a lot about space in music there. When you’re performing in front of an attentive audience, there’s a lot of pressure to keep changing things, to move the music and your body, make things progress in some sort of visual way. In the shadows at Phoebe’s, I could let a simple melody or pattern settle into the space, get into all the corners.” Great Melodies from Around (2011) After gigging around, Wildenhaus ventured out of the shadows to start playing real shows. His first performance after stepping out of his wallpaper roll was at the Regina Rex inside a Takashi Horisaki’s latex sculpture with about 15 people sitting around him. “At that point I had the confidence in my playing and direction to lead an audience with my performance,” he says. “A character started to emerge on stage, an anxious Neil Hamburger type who’s aggressively demanding audience attention.” Offstage, his burgeoning zeal for composition and professionalism had crystalized, and he started taking work scoring film shorts and videos for Etsy, the occasional video game, a web series, NPR, and other non-profits. Eventually, he cut Great Melodies from Around, which traipses hazily through Eastern-influenced melodies and rhythms, fireside pedal-steel languor, and just about everything in between. Using tape loops, voice, guitars, bass, drums, a sine-wave generator, pedal steel, lap steel, accordion, piano, and a Wurlitzer [organ], Wildenhaus traverses melody fragments and song sections that seem to drift in and out like wraiths, never staying long enough to grow tiresome. The result is at once meditative, transformative, and isolating. And with Melodies, Wildenhaus pinpointed what he calls his dream band—Jude Webre (Dimestore Dance Band) on bass, Anthony LaMarca (War on Drugs, Dean & Britta) on drums, and Denise Fillion (Iktus Piano & Percussion Duo) playing his Wurlitzer 200a. “We started playing Zebulon, a now defunct francophile bar in Williamsburg that had a great musician music scene going on,” he says. “Lots of global music, experimental sounds, local weirdos, and neighborhood celebrities.” When James Anthony of Riot Bear Recording Co. heard a cassette copy of Melodies, he picked up the record, pressed vinyl, and had CD copies made. It met favorable reviews, and tours and SXSW followed. Wildenhaus also started collaborating with the House Plants outfit on video projects, including the 30-minute Orbothology, a self-described “trippy, stoner video projector/music nightmare.” II (2015) “We recorded II in the summer of 2012 as my family packed up to move to Seattle,” Wildenhaus says. “It took another year of being too poor and dealing with seasonal-affective disorder and homecoming shock before I was able to get the ball rolling again.” The idea of professionalism, which is “abundant in NYC and unheard of in the old NW DIY scene,” drove the creation of II, he says. “Great Melodies From Around was meant to sound like a pastiche of found sounds and various kinds of degraded-fidelity media. II is completely pro.” Thus, some additional players on II: Vocalist Clara Kennedy is a Juilliard graduate, Scott Matthew is an internationally successful touring artist (and was also featured prominently in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus), and Jeff Cook is a full-time Midtown Manhattan studio engineer who also runs a more affordable night-and-weekend studio from his Bushwick home for “friends and like-minded poor-asses.” The resulting II is a mirror record, meaning that side two is a mirror image of side one, physically, thematically, and melodically. The song breaks in the grooves on side one look identical to those on side two. Side one features the vocals of Kennedy on four of its five songs, and side two features the vocals of Matthew on four of its five songs. Wildenhaus explains further: “For example, the first song on side one is "Bad Lament I,” which is based on a three-note melody sung by Clara. Its flipside, “Bad Lament II” contains the same three-note melody now sung by Scott. “The Knife Thrower I” is the opening-credits theme song to an imagined ‘70s Italian western, and on side two, "The Knife Thrower II” could be considered the score to that imagined film’s tense finale.“ “Al Azif” features Kennedy and Wildenhaus’s solo guitars laying a pensive melody over a mesmeric sine wave loop. The name comes from H.P. Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon.” In that book, Lovecraft uses the term “Al Azif,” an Arabic word he interpreted as “whistling wind” or “weird noise.” But Wildenhaus says: “My Arabic-fluent friends say it means something closer to ‘musician,’ or ‘instrument player,’ but I wanted the song to mimic what Lovecraft called ‘that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed to be the howling of demons.’ Side two’s counterpart of that song is “An Nur,” which translated from Arabic means “the light,” a Qu’ranic reference to the guiding light of Allah.” The record employs themes of classic duality that exploit the dual-program format of the vinyl record—good versus evil, light versus dark, but as “a good little grad student” Wildenhaus says he couldn’t let duality go untarnished. “The melodies from side one slip into side two, and vice versa. Neither character [in side one’s Spanish-sung closing ballad, “Tú,” and side two’s English-sung closing ballad, “Two”] is good or evil—they’re both crazy.” The overall sound of II is crisp and deliberate. It plays out like a precise map without a note or tone in the wrong place. In 2015, Wildenhaus is set to play live sets of the new material in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as throughout the Northwest. In culmination, Wildenhaus says of his recordings under the name Ben Von Wildenhaus: “Both Melodies and II are conceptual. Melodies is based on degraded audio fidelity, and II is based on pristine New York sensibility. Also, I moved to Seattle by the end of the II’s production. So if Melodies was how I imagined my ideal northwest, II is how I like to remember NYC.” • Recorded by Jeff Cook at Linden Underground. • Mastered by Rick Fisher (Steve Miller, Pearl Jam, bro), • Vinyl features lacquers by John Golden and RTI vinyl (high-end, man). guitar noir, profuse sweating, and international balladry.