Music | Visual Art

BAM is pleased to present a new experimental work by Ben Vida that examines the aural threshold between verbal sense and nonsense. Featuring a quartet of vocalists, And So Now oscillates between the phonetic and the linguistic; at times the tempo and rhythm of the speech lifts the language outside the realm of communication, shifting it into pure sound. Cyclical singing is juxtaposed with spoken monologues foregrounding the material aspects of language. As the vocalists exchange words and phrases, a narrative develops, revealing how the communicative “signal to noise” ratios have fallen out of balance. Accompanying the vocalists is a soporific bed of electronically synthesized audio. This lattice of voices and electronics acts to create a mesmerizing aural experience.

Inspired by the text sourcing methods used in John Cage’s Diary and Thomas Bernhard’s Voice Imitator, the rhythmical essays of Gertrude Stein and the parsing systems of the Conceptual Writers movement, the verbal score of And So Now references a history of experimental writing.

About Ben Vida
Ben Vida lives and works in New York. He has been an active member of the international experimental music community for two decades. In the mid-1990s Vida co-founded the minimalist quartet Town & Country and released solo records under the moniker Bird Show. He has released records on numerous labels including Alku, PAN, Future Audio Graphics, and Kranky, and his most recent LP Damaged Particulates was released on Shelter Press. His work has been featured in Artforum, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Art Review, The Wire, The Creators Project, and WIRED, among others. In addition to his musical endeavors, Vida has exhibited his work as a contemporary artist with recent solo exhibitions at Lisa Cooley Gallery in New York and 356 S. Mission Rd in Los Angeles. His work has also been presented at the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; PRESENCES électronique At GRM/INA in Paris; The Kitchen in New York; Performa Biennial; EMPAC in Troy, New York; Leap Gallery Berlin; Lampo in Chicago; Cricoteka in Kraków, Poland; The Artist’s Institute in New York; the Sydney Opera House; LiveArtsWeeks at Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; the Borderline Festival in Athens, Greece; and the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown Festival in London.