Ben Baker Billington returns with another installment of exploratory synthesizer tracks as Quicksails. Billington concentrates on texture and produces a knotty often discordant soundscape that probes beneath placid veneers. Wresting form from apparently random collections of sound, Billington uses rhythm as his organizational tool. A mixture of synthetic and live drums flit and flirt with Quicksails’ synth fills, vocal samples and, on three tracks, guest Patrick Shiroishi’s saxophone. From aqueous splodges and robotic squiggles, Billington patiently orientates the ear to his internal logic and as you adjust, tracks bloom and spread like kaleidoscopic algae insinuating their way into your consciousness and nesting there.
Even at his most straightforward, Billington makes choices that take his music in unexpected directions. Bursts of celestial choir, free jazz drumming, stretches of meditative synth, muttering voices deep in the mix, arpeggiated house rhythms bubble out of the mix. A series of koans that revel in paradox, Surface is far more than an academic riddle or playful piss-take. What lies beneath are lines of connection across genre, juxtapositions that grind smooth contradiction and difference to create interstitial spaces where music exists as intrinsic. The chaos of “Chat Laugh” pairs bleeps and burps with a house shuffle that circles like a cantankerous, distracted AI generator confounded by human noise programs. It segues into “All of Alex” on which Shiroishi’s plangent tenor provides a deeply human presence amid the digital detritus. On “Piss + Moan” Billington rolls around the drum kit in free jazz mode as sheets of synth rise like dusk fog. “Hope Slide” is all twinkling synths, subtle percussion and Shiroishi stretching notes in the distance with a monk-like intensity. As the album progresses Billington brings his machines to leash, using them as structural elements supporting the emotional expression in his music. The title track, which closes the album, is a meditation on the struggle to overcome restive distractions that characterize many of the preceding pieces. The beats are sparse, conjuring the dripping water of a Zen garden fountain, the synth beds strive for the celestial amid pops and squeaks which one has to listen through in order to focus on the transcendent.
As Quicksails, Billington has tended to the ambient end of electronica without ever completely foregoing his interest in more extreme music. On Surface the balance seems more contingent than usual and this feels deliberate. In Shiroishi he finds a collaborator of great sensitivity and the three tracks they make together leave you hoping they have plans for future music. In the meantime, this is a record that bewitches if you let it.
Chicago musician Ben Baker Billington is best known as the drummer for avant-garde collective Ono and free jazz trio Tiger Hatchery, among others. Under his electronic moniker Quicksails, Billington charts a calmer course through an archipelago of lambent synth based ambience. Built from layers of drones, loops and melodic snippets over intricate electronic and acoustic percussion, Billington creates eight miniature atmospheres from pieces recorded between 2016 and 2019. Though made before COVID, these are ideal vehicles for transcending the difficult times in which we find ourselves. By turns meditative and transportive, Blue Rise drifts by like a soft breeze with enough pollen to keep the listener both relaxed and alert. Filigrees of vocal samples, shakers, gongs, clicks, brushes and twinkling synths decorate Billington’s worlds.
“Cypress” begins with the kind of glitchy beats heard on numerous Mille Plateaux releases in the early 2000s over a vocal sample that may be an answering machine message or overheard phone soliloquy; chimes and squelchy synth lines fidget and jostle like impatient nightclubbers checking their gear before receiving the bouncers’ benediction. “Believe The Clouds” evokes a similar feeling of itchy anticipation before it resolves into long humid chords and a choir of wordless notes.
Billington demonstrates his skill at subverting classic New Age tropes with judicious use of his rhythmic sense and ear for details. The pieces are restless rather than busy like so many of us in this age of confinement and they speak directly to distracted busyness and the lassitude of having things to do, avoidance activity and that combination of guilt and devil-may-care that overtakes us sometimes. Voices heard through walls, staring out the window, distant echoes of life out there and the louche joy of drifting through what ever day or hour it is as music embeds itself into your subconscious and sticks.
Blue Rise is a collection of self-contained, three-dimensional jewels that reflect and refract. Pinpoints of light that illuminate without blinding, a tonic of delicacy and harmony in a crude world.
Quicksails is Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist producer Ben Billington. The Bright follows 2016's Mortal LP on Hausu Mountain and a catalog of vinyl and tape releases on labels like Spectrum Spools and NNA. In a host of other projects including the shapeshifting improv group ADT, the long-running experimental industrial collective ONO, and the firebrand free-jazz trio Tiger Hatchery, Billington's freewheeling drum performances swerve between loose-limbed, cascading flourishes and steady rock-informed grooves. Alone behind his rig of synths and samplers, Quicksails transmutes his mentality behind the drum kit to the realm of electronic production. His compositions unfold with pulsing electronic leads and swathes of polyphonic drone that wash his mixes in a new age sheen to contrast the stark industrial percussion patterns beneath. He stacks interacting rhythmic elements into multi-tiered mosaics that bear the unpredictable structural detours of electro-acoustic improv and a focus on texture and atmosphere in line with the school of 70s kosmische and the 21st century ambient underground. Quicksails's tracks juxtapose lush piano and harp-like synth voices with amorphous loops of staccato rhythm. Billington tempers his fascination with sampled acoustic sound sources with explorations of the molding and disfiguring of electronics into alien formants somewhere between drum voices and dollops of tonality.
The tape's B-side invites a crew of friends and Hausu Mountain artists to reinterpret The Bright. Ohio-based producer Khaki Blazer (Pat Modugno of Moth Cock) mangles fragments of the tape's title track into a stew of garbled carnival-core samples and percolating, footwork-inspired beats. Chicago-based composer/synthesist Brett Naucke stretches and processes the layered electronic missives of "My Moon" into a web of panning melodic patches and bursts of mechanical grit. Austin's Shit and Shine churn up "Purge" into a quivering pile of rhythmic magma and bump through the noise with bruised drum patterns. Angel Marcloid's (HausMo artist Fire-Toolz) omnivorous vapor/synth project Mindspring Memories melts "Flinch" into a half-remembered 80s slow jam carried through a series of dramatic crescendos.
To be released on cassette and digitally on 5/25/18. Blue tape with black imprints. 2-sided 3-panel J-Card with artwork from HausMo Max. Chrome Plus stock.
(In 200 Words, we highlight a new record we like a lot, via a 200-word review by Marc Masters and 200 words (or so) from the artist about whatever they choose.)
QUICKSAILS - Mortal LP (Hausu Mountain)
When I last heard from Ben Baker Billington’s Quicksails project it was via the excellent Fleurs De La Lune LP, a very diverse and tough to pin down work that still sticks deep in my brain. Mortal is pretty much the perfect follow-up, in that it’s just as diverse and non-pinnable, but it also feels bigger, wider, more open, and more encompassing. There’s diversity that’s about carefully-chosen control and there’s diversity that’s about unrestricted adventure...and somehow Billington has mastered both of those qualities on Mortal.
For me, that makes the most exciting parts of the album the ones that are most about pure, free bliss. My favorite tunes, like the cycling bubble bath “Ambassador” and the sun-baked cloud “Dance of Eyes,” are perfectly happy to let their bright hooks run on and on, eschewing unnatural changes or pasted-on textures. There’s also a lot of density and complexity on Mortal, and no track is anywhere near predictable. But even the most abstract material feels loose and confident and just stresslessly content with existence. Maybe that’s what the album title’s about - this is music that gleefully accepts its fate, and isn’t really worried about the fact that it’s going to end.
– Marc Masters
BEN BAKER BILLINGTON on Mortal
There's a recurring dream/story that I've re-told in my head since I was a young teenager that paints a picture of what inspired a great deal of Mortal. The dream starts in the shadows of a banana tree with an overly ambitious but mature weasel named Fee. The weasel was a buddhist that hoped his religion would set him free, which he had seen happen with his friend Floyd the chimp. At some point Fee meets a beautiful gospel singer named Milly at a bar in Peru and quickly fell in love. Unfortunately his old friend Floyd had already hoped to have Milly as his companion and became quite jealous. Later on Floyd unexpectedly ran into Milly and Fee on a boat towards Canada, which led him to attack Fee with a broken bottle. Although a tiny being, Milly fought back and hit Floyd in the face with a nectarine. Floyd was stunned and fell over the side of the boat, then hanging on by only one finger. Milly was incredibly angry, so she took a piece of paper from her pocket and sliced Floyd on the chest so he'd lose his grip. He fell into the ocean and was swiftly torn apart by sharks. Despite the brutal occurrence, Fee and Milly were able to live happily ever after in love. Thanks to TA for the story and life inspiration at age 12; I owe you more than you know.
