Up in Air, by Ben Pritchard

Up in Air

by Ben Pritchard

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
45 rpm

Includes unlimited streaming of Up in Air via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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Purchasable with gift card

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1.	Glow Line 03:56	buy track
2.	4 ½ 03:09	buy track
3.	Lifelong 02:20	buy track
4.	Deathless 02:21	buy track
5.	Peals 04:42	buy track
6.	11 April 20 01:06	buy track
7.	Up in Air 03:33	buy track
8.	Instruments for A 04:00	buy track
9.	Recent Ten 04:19	buy track
10.	Mouth on Fire 03:38	buy track

about

After a near decade of solo and collaborative projects, Up in Air is Ben Pritchard's most confident foray into songwriting yet, nestling lopsided experimentation into a bed of lowslung blues and reflective folk.

Up in Air is sewn from threads of everyday life: trails of thought, small stories and conversations with his daughter. Collecting, layering and condensing the world around him, his musings spill out in a palimpsest that renders both the material and metaphysical world. From describing a time where he inadvertently found himself on a hunting trip, recalling stories from doing role play and drawing together with his daughter, or scribing observations on the strange dedications people make in their lives, he explores the banal and the fantastical; the whimsical and the serious; the light and dark. Each line, aphorism or vignette carries with it weight that is looking to free itself, to embrace the impossibility of life distilled into simpler parameters.

Ben's music acts as a motor for his words, weaving wistful melodic mantras and creaking guitar lines in and out as each song finds its feet. Although the album finds a rich array of influences dancing in an awkward balance, the emotive register of the music drinks from the fountain of the US rock continuum, with Supreme Dicks' uneasy indie, Low's slow unfurling grace and Neil Youngs' heart-worn drawl lifting each song to new heights. Expanding on this soundworld are collaborators Sholto Dobie (self-built organs) and bassist Otto Willberg, who provide drones, dissonant jolts and detuned paths for the music to open itself, but also curl into its own. Sounds are folded into one another, birthing new shapes, layers and sonic possibilities.

Ben describes the album as "permeated by the sense that came from being around this sort of connection to the world where everything is immediate and fundamental." The album is representative of this shift inwards: on his own, socially, as a parent. But with that it also represents a confidence to deal with everything. The album is an excavation, both finding strange joy in simple findings and an unburdening himself of everything else, letting every thought and feeling whisks itself away up in the air.

-- Fielding Hope (curator Cafe Oto, London)

credits

released November 17, 2021

Ben Pritchard : guitar, voice, drums, percussion
Otto Willberg : double bass
Sholto Dobie : table organ

Recorded in London and Vilnius in the spring of 2020
Mixed by Ben Pritchard in London during 2020
Mastered by Harris Newman in Montréal in February 2021
Illustration by Gwénola Carrere in Brussels in February-March 2021

license

about

Okraina Records Brussels, Belgium

- Окраина : [Records of the Outskirts], Brussels based label founded by Philippe Delvosalle, inspired by Boris Barnet's film of 1933 and devoted to 10 inch vinyls with all sleeves designed by Gwénola Carrère

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