Benjamin Louis Brody is a New York-based musician and sound artist who creates sublime walls of sound through ambient textures that combine post- rock and modern minimalism to forge a dynamic resonance with his listeners.. Three years after Far Away Music, he is back with a new album called Floating Into Infinity which features Ian Chang (Son Lux).
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The composition utilizes a vanguard sampling program for drummers called Sensory Percussion, a machine learning technology that gives Chang,“the ability to teach the software the nuances of my acoustic drumming in order to convert the drum kit into a hyper sensitive sampler.”
It’s a technique that allowed for the altering of auditory perception through manipulation and processing of pre-recorded sounds where, as Brody describes it, “simply slowing down, speeding up or presenting fragments of a particular sample can lead to completely new auditory worlds, while also providing a sense of connection to sounds from the past.” A connection that Brody calls Sonic DNA, “a chain of smaller sound sources that make up distinct fundamental characteristics of a work.” The combination of those two ideas allowed Brody and Chang to “translate the physicality of drumming into customizable sonic environments with software that is able to learn the parameters of the drum to understand where and how you’re hitting the drum giving the performer interpretive freedom.”
“I would be surprised if anyone who’s heard the music would guess that it’s written to be performed on drums, and I think that speaks to the unique experience of performing this music,” says Chang in describing Floating Into Infinity. “The physicality of playing the drums feels familiar, but the way my limbs relate to the sweeping textures that I’m triggering feels completely new.”
As Brody created the sonic structure of Floating Into Infinity by weaving fragments of larger structures and assigning parameters, he explains that he couldn’t help but relate this to our own physical structure and “how we are made up of the elements of the universe, composed of trillions of cells, all with their own specialized function and an organ system that works together to keep us alive.”
“Brody’s command of texture and sound design is at the heart of his compositions,” describes Chang. “I really love how this body of work always feels like it’s constantly moving and bubbling on a micro level, while breathing in slow motion on a macro level, like a forest.”