A Lot by Ben Felton

What if the vaporous, radiant, pulsing guitar-and-synth music we call krautrock had been conceived not in twentieth-century Germany, but in the contemporary American South? Whether Ben Felton is playing in the duo Tacoma Park or as a solo artist, his music always strikes me as a
compelling, compulsively listenable answer to this question.

The influence of Cluster and Harmonia is evident on Ben’s latest solo record, A Lot—to saynothing of the monumental minimalism of Phill Niblock and the craggier version of Pan Sonic—but it’s no simple pastiche. Ben’s own point of view predominates his markedly gentle,
carefully constructed, highly melodic style of electronic psychedelia.

Ben is from New York but has long lived in Carrboro, North Carolina, home of the legendary rock club Cat’s Cradle. On A Lot, ten tracks built up in thin layers of lacquered synths, expressive electric and acoustic guitars, and contrasting drum machines and field recordings capture what it’s like to move through this liminal place, where blocky urban environments and lush rural ones are all tumbled together, where modernity and history try to occupy the same spaces, and where each season—in a year or in a life—makes itself distinctly felt.

On its warmly gleaming surface, A Lot is an adventurous yet deeply habitable world where striking electronic structures dot long, winding trails of guitar that wander into tight corners or open country, always riding the line where focused improvisation becomes practiced composition. But perhaps there’s a deeper story behind the record’s special glow.

Ben began making A Lot while expecting his first child, and he finished it in whatever early-morning hours he could find in the weeks after she was born. This isn’t what the record is about,but it’s what was about the record, and surely the expectant tension of waiting for a baby and the
surreal release of new parenting suffused the work of a musician as sensitive and receptive as Ben is. When he was finished, he realized it had taken him nine months to make.

I know Ben to be a perfectionist in his music, and while A Lot is just as technically impressive ashis prior albums, I hear a winning immediacy and naturalness that comes only from letting perfection go. Even for someone who always makes electronics breathe so organically, the record is markedly alive, unpredictable, full of things to feel and see after it rises from richly recorded river water in the beginning, before the river closes over it again at the end.

I also know Ben to be an excellent crafter of long-form videos to accompany his long-form performances, moving his work closer to a holistic idea that is apparent even in its constituent parts, like A Lot. It’s music of watching, listening, thinking, feeling, processing, thinking again, replenishing, and finally, doing—a core sample from the life of one person and the vast, unimaginably complex ecosystem he inhabits.

—Brian Howe (Pitchfork, INDY Week)