Modern Aviation carries on a prodigious piecemeal run of releases with the densely packed yet compellingly cohesive debut album from Ben Winter
Although he’s been slowly self-releasing EPs via Bandcamp since 2015, it took an appearance on Modern Aviation’s Par Avion compilation, from earlier this year, to raise our awareness of the Yorkshire-bred but now London-based Ben Winter. Overspilling from its creator’s multimedia operations – which includes work in theatre sound design and painting – Still Animals defies predictable pigeonholing in the healthy but crowded contemporary electronica scene.
Proceedings begin bracingly with “Surfacing”, an arresting and uncompromising eight or so minutes of digitally diced and spliced musique concrète full of feverish field recordings, aural ticks and varispeed looping, which seems destined to accompany an avant-garde art installation one day. After such a disorientating yet powerful prologue, Winter takes us through various styles and levels of intensity with satisfying results.
Thus, elsewhere there is stealthily deployed art-pop-noir (in the shape of “Antigone”, featuring guest vocals from actress Annabelle Baldwin); circuitous trips into the murkiest drone-centric corners of the kosmische world (“Irreversible”, “Men Without Women” and “Second Moon”); harsh but hypnotic Autechre-meets-Four Tet glitchtronica (“CUTS” and “Powerland”); cinematic scene settings in search of a latter-day horror film (“Soft Field”); and the title track’s mesmeric melding of piano and electronics (reprised from the aforementioned Par Avion collection).
There is a lot to take in across the nine segments of Still Animals, with some passages feeling like they could have sprawled out into album sized portions of their own. However, funnelling such jostling sonic diversity into one relatively compact place is part of the overarching creative success story documented here. Hopefully, we’ll be hearing a lot more from Ben Winter sooner rather than later…
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