Benge

Ben Ed­wards is a com­poser, pro­ducer and col­lab­o­ra­tor, writ­ing, record­ing, mix­ing and cre­ated his own stu­dio: Meme­tune. I started work­ing with him when he was doing Ten­nis (a duo with Dou­glas Ben­ford from Sprawl Im­print) and re­leased 2 al­bums on BiP_HOp. Later on I had plea­sure fol­low­ing/sup­port­ing his Ex­pand­ing label and his play­ing more and more beau­ti­ful Vin­tage synths…

« I have been fas­ci­nated by mod­u­lar synths for a very long time. To me they rep­re­sent the apex of elec­tronic mu­si­cal ex­pres­sion. I have never been a ‘key­board player’ type mu­si­cian. I pre­fer music that has been put to­gether in a more me­chan­i­cal way – I like lis­ten­ing to the ma­chines more than the hu­mans.  I never both­ered to prac­tice my scales or even think about con­struct­ing music from a “key­board” point of view. Not that I don’t like some music pro­duced by great key­boardists, and great hu­mans, its just that my di­rec­tion of travel has been away from that and more to­wards lis­ten­ing to the ma­chines. Ob­vi­ously com­put­ers can now recre­ate any­thing that can be done with a mod­u­lar sys­tem, but the dif­fer­ence is for me they can never re­place the ex­pe­ri­ence of being in the pres­ence of a phys­i­cal ob­ject like a mod­u­lar syn­the­siser. We live in the phys­i­cal realm, but too much of life now seems to be ex­pe­ri­enced in the vir­tual realm, its not some­where I want to be spend­ing my cre­ative time. So thats why I am so ob­sessed with mod­u­lar synths, and I think I am just stuck in my ways and am still liv­ing in the phys­i­cal world – I can’t seem to break away from it!»

 

What have you been work­ing on lately, and do you have any up­com­ing re­leases or per­for­mances?

I am a mem­ber of sev­eral bands, which often play live and do lit­tle tours. I am in a band with Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire) and Phil Win­ter (Tunng) called Wran­gler. We have also col­lab­o­rated with John Grant and formed a new band with him called Creep Show. I col­lab­o­rated with Mal on his re­cent album ‘Um Dada’ which fea­tured a lot of mod­u­lar work. I am also in John Foxx and The Maths (I’m The Maths), we’ve got a new album com­ing out in a few months, which we are very ex­cited about. I work with Neil Arthur (Blanc­mange) as Fader, as well as doing the new Blanc­mange al­bums with him. And there is an­other project I do with my friends Sid and Dave called Ob­long, we are work­ing on a new album (our third). I also do quite a bit of Li­brary music (cur­rently some new al­bums with Jon Tye as Wave­length), and have been in­volved over the years in a lot of ‘com­mer­cial’ music, I have to pay the bills some­times! I’m very proud of every­thing I do, its all done with love and pas­sion, and each year brings new projects and col­lab­o­ra­tions, and al­ways has done – there have been so many. I feel so lucky to have the op­por­tu­nity to work with so many great peo­ple over the years. It makes work­ing with the heart­less ma­chines so much more bear­able

How were you first ac­quainted to Mod­u­lar Syn­the­sis?

My par­ents ran a small in­de­pen­dent school in the 1970s at our fam­ily home, and there was a music room with a strange mod­u­lar syn­the­siser in it called ‘The Black Box’ which I used to ex­per­i­ment with when I was about 10, maybe younger. It was given to the school by a fam­ily friend and was a small home-​made box with os­cil­la­tors, fil­ters, ring mod­u­la­tors, en­velopes, all patch­able with ba­nana ca­bles. The let­ter­ing was all done with Dymo la­bels. Any­way, I used to be fas­ci­nated with that thing and play on it every evening. There was also an elec­tric organ with a built-​in drum ma­chine, and lots of xy­lo­phones, per­cus­sion in­stru­ments, and even a four-​track tape ma­chine that I used when I got a bit older – maybe around 13/14. I set my first stu­dio up in my bed­room when I was 16 and then when I moved into my first house I had my down­stairs liv­ing room as my stu­dio. Soon it took over my whole house/life. Thats when I got my Moog mod­u­lar (very cheap in 1994) and a huge 8 track tape ma­chine, and I re­alised I had to set up a proper stu­dio. I set up my record label (Ex­pand­ing Records) and com­mer­cial music busi­ness and started run­ning the stu­dio prop­erly as a hub for all my projects. I have re­leased 30 al­bums of my own music and roughly the same amount of col­lab­o­ra­tion al­bums with var­i­ous peo­ple over the years

What was the ef­fect of that dis­cov­ery on your com­po­si­tional process?
On your ex­is­tence?

I al­ways saw the equip­ment as part of the com­po­si­tional process, like the stu­dio was re­ally the in­stru­ment. The en­vi­ron­ment in­spires every­thing, and the more I am in tune with the stu­dio around me the more in­spi­ra­tion I find there. Mod­u­lar in essence is the idea of con­nec­tiv­ity, in­ter­con­nec­tiv­ity, com­bin­ing and re­com­bin­ing sig­nals and shap­ing sound and com­po­si­tion in any way imag­in­able, and the bet­ter in tune with your sur­round­ings you are the more you can cre­ate your own unique voice. I think the best thing in any stu­dio is the patch­bay, es­pe­cially if you have thought through your setup so that every­thing can come and go prop­erly though it. Mod­u­lar synths fit into this way of work­ing so well, but why stop with purpose-​built mod­u­lar gear – any­thing with an input and out­put can be con­nected to a patch­bay and be­come part of a big­ger sys­tem – to me all pro­duc­tion in the stu­dio is part of this giant mod­u­lar ap­proach – thats the idea be­hind Meme­tune Stu­dio – every­thing is con­nected up – from the syn­the­sis­ers, se­quencers, mod­u­lar sys­tems, to the FX units, mix­ing con­soles, com­put­ers and recorders, cof­fee ma­chines…

Quite often mod­u­lar­ists are in need for more, their hunger for new mod­ules is never sat­is­fied? How do you ex­plain that?

The whole point in mod­u­lar synths is that they are uniquely con­fig­urable and ex­pand­able, they change and grow as you do as an artist. Its to­tally unique in the mu­si­cal world, that the artist can grow their in­stru­ment or­gan­i­cally and keep evolv­ing it. You can’t do that with a vi­o­lin!

Would you please de­scribe the sys­tem you used to cre­ate the music for us?

I used 13 self-​contained sys­tems for this mix-​up. Each one was recorded in real-​time with no over­dubs or edits. So in other words I set up a patch on the sys­tem at hand and ei­ther let it do its thing as a self-​playing patch, or in­ter­acted with it and ma­nip­u­lated the pa­ra­me­ters in real-​time to cre­ate each piece. Some tracks were played more from the key­board (if the sys­tem had one) and oth­ers were more self-​sequencing. I tried to let the ma­chines speak and I went with the flow as much as pos­si­ble

What would be the sys­tem you are dream­ing of?

I pre­fer to think about what stuff I al­ready have and try and use it in new ways and com­bi­na­tions. Once you have got a cer­tain amount of things the com­bi­na­tions present so many op­por­tu­ni­ties that there is not enough time in a day to ex­plore them all. I like putting to­gether prod­ucts from man­u­fac­tur­ers that are of the same era, so for ex­am­ple set­ting up sta­tions in the stu­dio of just Roland prod­ucts made in the mid 1980s, or an­other of Korg prod­ucts from the early 1990s – they tend to all have the same de­sign ethic and play well to­gether. I see this as a kind of Mod­ulisme ac­tu­ally

Are you feel­ing close to some other con­tem­po­rary Mod­u­lar­ists? 
Which ones?

Not re­ally!  I am not phys­i­cally close to any other mod­u­lar­ists – I live in the mid­dle of nowhere, and I am not that close styl­is­ti­cally to other artists that I know per­son­ally. I am sim­i­lar in ap­proach to some other artists but per­haps not who are work­ing today, maybe peo­ple from the 60s and 70s. There are lots of other mod­u­lar­ists that I ad­mire be­cause of their ap­proaches to patch­ing, for ex­am­ple Todd Bar­ton and his Krell patch demos are great, and I liked to watch Doug Lyn­ner’s patch-​of-the-week Serge youtubes, but I feel that there is a def­i­nite gap that needs fill­ing – and that is what you are doing I’m cer­tain!
Per­haps my angle is re­ally see­ing the whole stu­dio as a giant mod­u­lar synth, and ac­tu­ally life in gen­eral – every­thing in life con­nects to­gether and is some­how patch­able if only we can work out how to do it

Which pi­o­neers in Mod­u­lar­ism in­flu­enced you and why?

Sub­ot­nick, Tan­ger­ine Dream, Autechre (I think they use mod­u­lars but I’m not sure!), these are artists who I con­stantly go back to for their aes­thetic and tech­ni­cal in­spi­ra­tion

 


Any ad­vice you could share for those will­ing to start or de­velop their “Mod­ulisme”?

 

The most im­por­tant thing of all is to keep true to your­self and de­velop your own unique voice as an artist

http://my­blog­its­fullof­s­tars.blogspot.com