Tendryl, by Beshken

Tendryl

by Beshken

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Pantomime, Tendryl, Heaven and You're Gone Forever, Like You Do, When You Have a Block Make It a Sphere, Aisle of Palm (Remixes), Aisle of Palm, Cursed, and 5 more. , and , .

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1.	Tendryl 05:26	buy track
2.	Like You Do 04:49	buy track
3.	1234 04:34	buy track
4.	Fire Your Gun 04:02	buy track
5.	I Don't Care 05:12	buy track

about

Melancholic sunshine dreams in my pocket, I lift out a knife only to see a beautiful dress, I look within the dress and see a dark red horse awaiting me at the corner of my mind, a black hole of eventual night.

For New York-based electronic artist Ben Shirken, a.k.a. Beshken, his Tendryl marks a pivotal phase of self-exploration. Arising from an interest in the presence of magic and the unknown within familiar pockets of the real world, the music reflects his focus on disrupting common yet repetitive cycles of thought. Across five tracks written over the past two years, expectations of patterns are set up only to be continually broken in unexpected ways—through this unpredictable approach, he reveals a brand new side to his liminal sound.

Building on this foundation, the sonic ideas on Tendryl rely on the presence of a kind of magic that manifests itself when one experiences the unexpected. To Shirken, creating an unknown sound is like a form of experimental sorcery, where truth lies in designing new potions (patches) with only a slight idea of what the final result will be. With this in mind, he sets his internal explorations in motion with deliberately varied degrees of intentionality. Using a technique that combines modular synthesizers with the human voice to create randomly generated sequences, Shirken imbues his oscillating drum loops, ambient samples, and drones with an almost alien agency as they tumble through space.

In describing his path to discovering this method, Shirken points to Brian Eno’s concept of "Chunking Up”—the process of selecting a portion of generative audio to isolate and then use as a new sample to form the basis of another generative system. Eno himself was partial to magic, famously noting how in his view it happened when the seemingly simple was revealed to be anything but. It’s through this principle that Shirken searches for his own version of this elusive feeling, creating kinetic constellations that take particularly well to the thick, flooding low ends they meet.

The textures that result then coalesce into extended weightless wanders where unlikely harmonies are struck. In “1234,” a near-breakbeat backbone splinters into a prickly cluster of synth blips ricocheting off one another like a reactor gone haywire. “Fire Your Gun” sends watery plinks rippling across a hammering industrial beat that suddenly disappears for nearly thirty seconds of ambient suspension. On “Like You Do,” Shirken’s faraway vocals echo like a mantra over a driving deep house foundation, while a glassy piano line twirls a spiral staircase into another plane. In these juxtapositions, Shirken finds hidden windows to the multiplicity of his experience.

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released April 16, 2021

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Beshken New York

~ me ~
besh@beshken.us

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