British poet, songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Osborn presents his debut album Letters from the Border, due out on April 19th 2019. The result of an extraordinary musical partnership with the head of Nonostar Records – German experimental violinist Alex Stolze – the album was created at the remote Nonostar Studio on the German-Polish border in the summer of 2018. It includes the lead singles Fast Awake (November 2018) and A Bridge of Starlings (February 2019). Listen to the album in full below and don’t miss Ben’s upcoming dates (details below):
Channelling Leonard Cohen-esque balladry, Ben’s penetrating poetic lyrics are set against ethereal string arrangements, skittering, Bjork-like beats and dreamlike Erik Satie inspired piano chords. The studio’s rural location provided another level of sound, as the birds around the building would make their way onto many of the recordings. Ben explains, “I was reading a book about Jewish mythology that said that the voices of sparrows were thought to contain souls, so I made the connection with all the birds around the studio, whose voices made it onto many of the tracks”.
A mystical subtext is present from the opening instrumental Chedvah, named after an obscure Hebrew word for joy. For Ben, it represents “the joy of connecting to something bigger than yourself. The piece follows a numerical sequence based on the Hebrew letters of the word, taught to me as a breathing meditation by the artist Daniel Laufer. These are the first letters from the border”.
But the studio’s wild borderland setting was also a reminder of the dangerous reality of the border for those who have to cross it. The opening lines of the album’s title track – “When the fire swept over this continent / a host of sparrows rose from the broken things” – evoke a strange and broken world, at once the stories of Ben’s Eastern-European Jewish ancestry and the struggles faced by migrants and refugees today. “My ancestors came from Europe to the US before WWII,” Ben explains. “My great-grandfather was sending letters back to his family in Europe, but he didn’t know that they had already been killed. So he never received a reply to those letters.”
These themes of mysticism and global scale catastrophe are in turn set against intimate honest tales such as My Sister The Swimmer, an exploration of nostalgia and unspoken family conflicts, and A Guide to Gothenburg For The Sleepless which examines the universal experiences of grief and bereavement from a deeply personal perspective.
Ben Osborn is the latest artist to join the Nonostar roster, which has also seen the release of Alex Stolze’s acclaimed solo albums Mankind Animal and Outermost Edge as well as Solo Collective Part One, the highly praised debut release from the modern classical trio of Alex Stolze with cellist Anne Müller and pianist/producer Sebastian Reynolds. Other Nonostar releases include the Mahajanaka EP by Sebastian Reynolds and the Aracus EP by German producer Qrauer. As well as Ben Osborn’s album, there is a forthcoming Solo Collective Part Two record, a collection of compositions by Sebastian Reynolds, performed with Anne Müller and Alex Stolze plus guests.
Ben’s soundtracks and sound designs have won the Cameron Mackintosh Award, the Methuen Drama Emerging Artists Award, the Peter Brooke Empty Space Award and a Manchester Theatre Award. His critically acclaimed libretti have been performed at London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Bristol Proms, BBC Radio 3’s live concert series and the RCM Britten theatre among other prestigious venues. He is a co-founder of and teacher at the Berlin Open Music Lab, a free school for refugee musicians.
Letters from the Border is available on vinyl, CD and digital download via Nonostar Records, 19.04.19
ORDER HERE: https://benosborn.bandcamp.com/album/letters-from-the-border
Ben Osborn live dates
May 04 – Upstairs at the Dartmouth Inn, Totnes, UK
May 05 – The Wardrobe Theatre @ The Assembly, Bristol, UK
May 06 – Set Dalston, London, UK
May 26, Villa Neukölln, Berlin, Germany
More details and ticket links: http://ben-osborn.com/live
Photo Credit: Andrea Huyoff