Album releases are generally a pretty serious undertaking, but I imagine the process is remarkably less stressful if the artist doing the releasing is constantly creating out of sheer impulse or enjoyment. It’s a lot easier to honor a request for a rainbow painting if all you do during your downtime is paint rainbows. As such, the new Damaged Particulates LP from Chicago-based composer Ben Vida can be considered a bucket of water drawn from the ocean of minimalist and electroacoustic work that he seems to be engaged in for its own sake. Both sides of the LP have a story that don’t involve being created in vacuum, so don’t go into this thinking that Vida’s gonna take a few months off now that Shelter Press is assuming the sponsoring honors.
Side A is the “final iteration” of a piece that has been honed for roughly four years and was initially devised as a “number of individual synthesizer studies” under the name “Damaged Parts.” Eventually the smorgasbord was melded into a cohesive whole, which led to versions of the composition being presented at various museums around Europe and in New York. Side B ,”Reducing the Tempo to Zero,” is meanwhile an excerpt from a new long-form composition that’s reportedly around five hours long in full. Vida’s next seven albums already waiting to be packaged?
Damaged Particulates is out today on Shelter Press. Grab it here, and listen to some delicacy from the title track:
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