It was never easy to grasp Ben Vida’s music. The New York musician has always specialised on looking at music from different points of view and approach it from there. No matter whether he was playing with Jazz and Improvisation at Town & Country or whether he was simultaneously attending to world music and Musique concrète with his solo project Bird Show. However different the angles of his numerous projects and collaborations were, one thing always remained the same in Ben Vida’s sound: There was space. The tones of Town & Country were drifting towards the most remote corners of a cathedral, Bird Show even enlarged the space into nature. In that context, his new album »Esstends Esstends Esstends«, which he published under his real name, is different. It is tight. There doesn’t seem to be much space besides the modular synthesizers and a computer in the small room where the album must have been produced. Everything seems schematic, covered underneath a sheet of paper, on which a breadboard is meticulously drawn, culminating into one sentence: »Using just intoned pitch combinations to produce difference tones and harmonic distortions, sound materials are created that emanate from both the playback speakers and inner ear of the listener.« So, Ben Vida makes the listener hear sounds that don’t even really exist. In theory, this sounds very interesting, but has no influence whatsoever on the joy of listening. The result reminds one of Mark Fell in the few moments he lost his groove. The first third seems so incredibly static and undercooled as if the sounds were balancing on a steel needle. Ben Vida picks up his courage in the last 25 minutes and shows – especially in »Pin Ans Sweep« – his compositional talent to harmonise sound. That’s not enough, though. I guess, »Esstends Esstends Esstends« asks for more examination. The first few runs did not convince me all the way.
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