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CD
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AMI 041CD
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"Bird Show Band documents Bird Show's new collaborative spirit and stands as the culmination of Ben Vida's Chicago-based work, featuring a who's who of the city's improvisational luminaries, including Josh Abrams, Jim Baker, Dan Bitney and John Herndon. The improvisatory feel of the Bird Show Band sessions function as Vida's paean to the Windy City. Rather than another Bird Show release that involves guest accompaniment on select tracks, Vida conceived of these recordings as a foray into session playing, tracking the entire album over just two days. While Herndon and Bitney's percussion invokes German psych, progressive rock, and jazz idioms, Vida's synth-based experiments, here accompanied by Jim Baker's ARP 2600, provide the first indication of his recent musical preoccupations, an interest that relies heavily on the Moog and his own fluid, lyrical melodic lines. If you have had the luck of catching Bird Show or Ben Vida perform live over the last few years, you have witnessed the centrality he now gives to the Moog and one-touch patchwork, experimental forays that point to Europe and the mid-century avant-garde, especially the Cologne-based innovations of Stockhausen and his many students during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Regardless of this description, Bird Show Band is more than a mere intellectual exercise and the sessions balance brain with musical brawn in ways that Vida has yet to achieve on his previous outings."
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LP
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AMI 041LP
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LP
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BRG 006LP
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Limited LP version. "Bird Show aka Ben Vida has been a major force in the avant-rock underground for over a decade. From his work in the seminal Town and Country to his two previous offerings under the Bird Show moniker, Ben has managed to consistently challenge his fan base while staying true to his unique musical vision. Untitled finds Ben exploring a wide variety of ethnic and traditional instruments creating an album of unique rhythmic ragas that are at once experimental yet easily listenable. Ben effortlessly blends world music clatter with indie rock song structure to create a modern composition that would instantly please fans of Konono No. 1 and Tortoise as well as Kemialliset Ystävät, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Jackie-O Motherfucker."
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CD
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KRANK 121CD
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"Ben Vida; Hammond XB-2, microKorg, Moog Voyager, Gibson SG, Berinbau, Shona Mbira, slit drum, pan pipes, shakers, Vietnamese jaw harp, tambourines, ride cymbal, congas, wood flute, ring modulator, elephant bells, violin, Qraqeb, zither, voice, ten string harp, frame drum, finger cymbals, triangle. Greg Davis; gong, bells, field recordings. This is the third album by Ben Vida under his Bird Show moniker following his Lightning Ghost album from 2006 on Kranky."
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KRANK 093CD
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"Lightning Ghost is the second Bird Show album, following the debut release Green Inferno. It centers around Ben Vida's home-fi sound experiments. Tracks are carved out of opiate'd chanting, disjunctive drum circles, synth meditation and prepared piano trance song. Vida's sonic explorations are embedded into tighter song structures, with a greater role given to vocals in the mix. The ceremonial air has been retained and expanded with a strong percussive presence and repeated, mesmerizing musical figures. Vida recorded the album at home, but much of the material resulted from the hours spent on stage this past year."
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KRANK 078CD
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"Ben Vida recorded and edited Green Inferno at home during the winter of 2003 and 2004 on a digital 16 track recorder singing and playing, violin, cornet, accordion, acoustic guitar, organ, qrareb (Moroccan castanets), assorted shakers tambourine and mbira, and integrating field recordings from Tokyo recorded by Atsuhiro Koizymi and from Puerto Rico by Fred Lonberg-Holm. Jeremy Lemos and Ben Vida mixed the album at Lemos' apartment. These home recordings differ from anything Ben has done in the past; though they retain elements of the many groups he has worked with over the years, with these recordings Ben delves deeper into realm of outsider stream of consciousness vocal/percussive/ psychedelic drone song . While working on Green Inferno, Vida had been listening to field recordings from around the world and Morocco, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan in particular. He found himself as interested in the surroundings the recordings were made in as he was in the music itself. Lattices of percussion blur in mesmerizing fashion, voices sing out over gongs, cicadas, and helicopters, trenchant drones break into conversations and then into song."
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