(2020) Ben Cox - Consciousness, and other tricks of the light


Review:
A title such as Consciousness, and other tricks of the light could portend a pretentious musical statement, but Ben Cox‘s release is decidedly not. On the contrary, it’s a modest set possessing no small amount of charm. Six pieces weigh in at just under forty minutes on the album, with an eclectic stylistic range encompassed. Even rarer for an ‘ambient’ album, two tracks are in the three-minute vicinity. While Consciousness, and other tricks of the light is Cox’s second solo release on Spotted Peccary, he’s been a musician and recording engineer since the mid-‘80s, and while the recording is rooted in synthesizers and electronics (specifically synths from Sequential / Dave Smith Instruments and Moog Music), he’s played trumpet and sung in earlier musical contexts. His interest in electronic music grew, in part, from a fascination for the rich sonic palettes that could be generated using electronic gear. On the opening “Einstein Cross,” Cox reads text from the Physics Stack Exchange by Ron Maimon, the spoken turn resonating less for what’s said (e.g., “The Jacobian is a diagonalizable matrix with nonzero eigenvalues…”) than for its impact as a sound element. The track’s bouncy, vaguely hip-hop inflected 5/4 groove announces immediately that the album won’t be a long-form ambient excursion, at least not in its entirety, and the combination of bass-throbbing and radiant synth textures likewise gives the tune a pop-like edge, the voiceover notwithstanding. With a title like “Delta Waves,” it’s no surprise that the piece should be an ambient-drone soundscape, quasi-symphonic in design and tranquil in effect. “Just Begin Again,” on the other hand, presents a Moog-based sound world whose twinkling patterns and warble might remind listeners of a certain age of “Baba O’Riley” and “Who Are You.” The becalmed ambient splendour of the longest setting, the thirteen-minute meditation “Matins,” is offset, somewhat perplexingly, by blurps and belches Cox elected to drape across its slow-motion tones and whooshes. He isn’t afraid to flout expectations either, as shown by his using electric guitar to generate the slowburn of “Chirality.” The unpretentiousness of the project bolsters its appeal, and there’s something also refreshing about the spirit of playfulness that infuses its content. As polished as the tracks are, a clear impression emerges that Cox derived a great deal of pleasure and even perhaps fun from the album production process.





Tracklist:
01 - Einstein Cross
02 - Delta Waves
03 - Just Begin Again
04 - Now
05 - Chirality
06 - Matins


Media Report:
Genre: ambient
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits