A combination of vibraphone improvisations with interactive live electronics, creating a constantly evolving experience of crystalline tones and immersive noise.

“Alike Untils” encapsulates everything that I find thrilling about improvised electro-acoustic music. The openness in Ben’s approach is evident in all four tracks - while there’s a sense that the music can head in any direction at any point, Ben’s sounds are never chaotic. Instead, they sit beautifully at the intersection of elasticity and intention; always entropic, always hypnotic.” - Chien-An Yuan, 1473

An album-length exepedition through an the title work, at the edge of noise, nonsense, and ambience. Performed by Garden Unit (Julia Asolabahere & Cameron Roberts), recorded by Konstantinos Baras & Ben Zucker at the Ryan Center for Musical Arts, Northwestern University, May 2023. Produced by Kory Reeder.

"a bravura study in entropy and decline"  - Ben Harper

Mad Myth Science is the collective musical offering of Molly Jones, Julian Otis, Wilson Tanner Smith, and Ben Zucker. Their through-improvised performances present a rich cross-section of Chicago creativity, bringing experience in jazz and creative music, contemporary composition, electronics, and dance and theatrical performing arts together into a pageantry of sound and spontaneous rituals.

"After Along The Way" is a refraction of musical travels, combining sounds from Poschiavo (CH), Buffalo (NY), and Chicago (IL) into a new gentle epic through unreal places. The album threads together field recordings, acoustic percussion, pianos, brass, and ambient production.

A digital single featuring Third Coast Percussion, paired with an original remix.

Revitalism featured in "La Hora Acusmatica' virtual concert, August 2023.

"Exploration and energy define this record, Semiterritory–even in moments of space and quiet, there is an omnipresent sense of flow and momentum, across compositional sections previously more didactically separated. If one listened to the albums Fifth Season and Semiterritory side by side, the source material would be apparent, yet all the more remarkable for how much further the band takes it in a live setting." 

"Aeroliths (countermonumental) is an early 2022 snapshot of ongoing work with electro-acoustic trumpet performance in real and unreal spaces—a series of live improvisations, paced for slow thinking, assembled into sound objects that loom, fade, burn; imposing at the boundaries of thingly tangibility."

"It’s another solo vibraphone record, in the vein of last year’s Uncommonplacing, but also an exploration of what lo-fi recording means for an instrument like this, coupled with preparations and subtle electronic warmth. I like to think it brings you in close before unsealing and unsettling you."

Released as Demiurgent

Cassette & digital release

This isn’t meant to be a philosophy lesson, just some context, some light provocation. The goal has been to fold several reels of real together: live improvised performances, field recordings, studio manipulations, analog and digital instruments, over and over, in order to make something that felt more dwellable, with more capacity for vitality at times, more space to reflect, to make trouble and stay with it in a contained way, than some recent reality. It is, of course, also highly imperfect.

Video accompaniments can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEFSK-Pq-wOYaqyWokvTJU7R8gkQr-Q6a

"Songs and improvisations recorded at home, to help get reacquainted with a new instrument friend and give the days some bright spots."

"No one would have believed in the first years of the 21st century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than our own...” 

Electronic soundtrack for "A War Of The Worlds", an audio drama production by Theater In The Dark bringing the classic story of alien terror into 21-st century Illinois...

"The music of Fifth Season, in particular, enables active collaboration and creativity through setting up improvised contexts via narrative text. By using long-form prose descriptions of gestures and textures, the forms of the music are guided yet open-ended, and content is constantly made anew in the moment."

"Detritus. Emissions. Ozone. Artifice. Tactful, inopportune nothing. An edition of a cross coastal electroacoustic collaboration, for one night only."

"A masterful trumpet solo that produces swaths of molding sound subject to the limits of analog technology."

"Ben makes noises in Chicago. He has been sleeping on these ones for some time. Or rather, they have been sleeping. A Microkorg, gradually gaining awareness of coming catastrophe, sighed in its bones and rattles crackled out with the long sweep of coronal flares. Like its cosmic older sibling, they aspire to create disruptions in fields, growing until its desire to consume and ripple and distort and overwhelm is no longer a negation but a dense affirmation too thick and unstratified to be contained in life as we know it, so that the digital air catches fire."

Accompanying video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh7qQ3ZL2AM

"Thinking about a piece of music for months and then producing it in a few days in a small explosion? Honestly, that’s how I work often, too often. But here, I’ve delved into softwares I’ve either recently built or used, and dug into my own personal archives of sounds of the world to instrumentalize them. It’s a time-honored tradition but one that never seems to exhaust itself, for there is so much world and so much to do and grow in it."

"Fields of sounding possibilities where a beat folds into a horn folds into a wash of pads folds into noise."

"...he tips the hat to Kenneth Gaburo’s system of ‘compositional linguistics’ and goes in a decidedly different direction. Drawing upon experience as a choral and improvisational singer, o ur gab is less a solo vocal album than an album of mouth music." (ATTN: Magazine)

 

"A combination of live and digital artistry, Confluere is composer Ben Zucker’s dynamic exploration of simultaneity: one month of improvised recordings layered together without edits. The resulting recording is rich with unexpected concurrences and potent juxtapositions, a work that is both meditative and melodically rich."