Interview: PRS Magazine

Interview with Hugh Morris from PRS for Music, talking about maximalism, emotional ambiguity and trying new things out. From December 2024.

Excerpt

On a fundamental level, the principle of maximalist saturation makes Ben's music both a product of and a response to the attention economy, and you can certainly link the music's onslaught of information to that economy's desire for constant interest. But the pieces probe in other ways, too: SERENITY 2.0, for example, was imagined as a guided meditation that goes wrong.

"Listeners are invited to enter into a relaxed meditative state, despite knowing well that an kind of serenity here is impossible" he wrote in a post accompanying the work. The piece found an ambiguous middle ground, balancing the value Ben puts on meditation — he finds it nard. but persists — with the highly commodified form of the practice that props up today’s wellness industry.

Daily Affirmation, a piece for the Colin Currie Quartet that Ben is currently finishing, deals with a similar conflict between the personal and the structural, all mediated by the internet. ‘I'm always trying to find this weird, ambiguous space, where its half-IronIc but also sincere at the same time,’ Ben tells M. These pieces are neither endorsements nor critiques of these cultural trends: they're more like pieces of reportage from someone living in the middle of it all.

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As he looks to the future, Ben feels his musical aims are shifting. What once felt sincere — ‘something really intense, everything all at once, in-your-face’ — has faded. ‘I’m more interested in finding these more subtle, ambiguous blurrings of feelings, emotions or concepts that feel more focused on one thing or a few particular things, and bringing out the rich ambiguity in those,’ he tells M.

Ben's piece for Southbank Sinfonia, Break-up Mantras, is suggestive of this change. It was forced by a change of span: a 20-minute commission ‘forced me to step back from my default,’ he says. What he found as a through-line was a specific technique — the sampling of euphoric pop samples, which he’d slow down to a crawl, then build instrumental structures around them. The result retains the sense of surreal whimsy from before, but feels more focused. As Ben notes, 'the collage or barrage of different material actually feels quite old for me now.’