Always Untils – Ben Zucker

“The metallurgic nature of most of my instrumental sound sources (vibraphone, brass instruments) is not underlooked. All of the names of realizations of this project relate to the nature of craft, combination, and energy that inform the project, and give alchemical significance to the live processing that underlies it.”

Always Untils marks the next mystical step in Ben Zucker’s work with interactive electronics and feedback, previously documented on Alike Untils (1473 Recordings, October 2024). On that first album, Zucker’s vibraphone playing set the stage for an intense, intoxicating continuous transformation of sound with a custom system of delays, samplers, and trackers. In subsequent performances across the Midwest USA and Europe, the possibilities of the system were continuously rediscovered, and adjusted to bring out their most dynamic extremes. Here, the instrumental focus moves to Zucker’s other primary instrument, cornet. 

The music of Always Untils was developed in residency at the famed Stockholm EMS, where Zucker took the first steps towards expanding the system to include multiple inputs and performers in preparation for work the Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theater (CLEAT), a unique 16-channel audio system at Elastic Arts. With four microphones and an immersive multichannel speaker system, they and the sounds wandered within the space. All the music featured here was made live, with long takes reconfigured but with no change to the ‘sounds themselves’. 

Always Untils calls to the past and future of working with the intangible, as music’s entanglements with mysticism and cybernetics are not far from mind here. Neither is Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The track titles lean into metaphysical reflections on change and identity— live processing as alchemy, the base materialism of feedback, the blurry line between where the instrumental ‘bodies’ begin and end, the mirror images of sonic satisfaction and obliteration. It offers a listening experience that is simultaneously contemplative and intensive, and highlights a bracing new branch of Zucker’s mercurial composer-performer practice.

Ben Zucker is an experimental composer and performer, interested in music’s unique capacities to model systems of change through a rigorous, dynamic play of contemplation and visceral immersion in sonic extremes. Starting from a background in jazz and theater, this speculation now regularly mixes in explorations of philosophy, improvisation, ambience, alternative notations, juxtapositions, and protocols.

His practice includes “stirring compositions…built on a lifetime of musical curiosity” (Chicago Reader), and performances on vibraphone, brass, keys, voice, and electronics across styles. This intentionally diverse practice has included highlights such as compositions featured at the Berlin Philharmonie, London Roundhouse, and in PBS documentaries, residencies with OneBeat and the Stockholm EMS, and collaborations with groundbreaking musical figures ranging from Anthony Braxton to Sudan Archives.

Deeply invested in the structural elements of musical life, their career has also involved extensive engagement with labor organizing, education, and project management. He lives in Chicago, working as a freelance artist, lecturer at Roosevelt University, President of New Music Chicago, and curator for Elastic Arts’ Improvised Music Series.

www.benzuckersounds.com
zvibes.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/benzuckersounds/
https://www.facebook.com/ben.zucker/

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