By It’s our Bandcamp Pick of the Week, featuring the stunning widescreen compositions of SONGS FOR SLEEPING DOGS from multi-instrumentalist Ben Hackett!
Ben Hackett – SONGS FOR SLEEPING DOGS
Genre: Ambient, Orchestral
Favorite Tracks: “Nylon Bell Pot,” “18pp,” “Loose Change 2,” “Music For Wood and Tape,” “Tombo Hunts For Bamboo Shoots”
There are moments on “Loose Changes 2,” the sweeping ten minute epic at the heart of Ben Hackett’s wistfully windswept SONGS FOR SLEEPING DOGS, that recall the great John Williams scores—somewhere between the rousing march of SUPERMAN’s main theme and the curious dispatches throughout CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. The B-Side to his debut single for his debut album (a split that also included the excellent “Nylon Bell”), Hackett uses “Loose Changes 2” as a maximalist expression of his abilities as a songwriter and composter, displaying widescreen cinematic familiarity while surveying and exploring the known and the unknown, a constant theme within the textures and sounds of the album.
A former member of psych pop act New Madrid and an engineer and session player in the Atlanta area, Hackett’s ear for these brilliant, looping harmonies is breathtaking, certainly influenced by similar panoramic ambient artists ranging from Steve Reich to Hiroshi Yoshimura to more modern touchpoints like Mary Lattimore or Arturs Liepins and Anete Stuce’s Domenique Dumont project. Its most straightforward songs are those of its titular subject, the white-and-beige sleeping dog in question Tombo. Our first encounter with him is on the calming stroll “Tombo Goes on a Walk and We Order Indian Food,” then later on the peaceful fusion of hushed woodwinds and hypnotic electronic textures “Tombo Takes a Bath,” and finally on album closer “Tombo Hunts for Bamboo Shoots,” a daydreaming flue centric samba. The three are a reasonable calling card to the freedom that lies within Hackett’s remarkable and detailed compositions.
But elsewhere within SONGS FOR SLEEPING DOGS are hidden some of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve heard all year, where Hackett’s attempt to control these endlessly rhythmic beams of light begins to warp and degrade, and where the music itself begins to, like “Loose Changes 2,” evolve into a filmic trance. On the brief interlude “18pp,” the music is constantly rewinding itself to where it came, like a tape recorder being reset as the passage of time is at a standstill for two minutes. Same with the album’s standout track “Music For Wood and Tape,” with cascading piano parts eloquently accenting a mix of strings and woodwinds, each part fusing into this vibrant, heartbreaking mirage. The circular heartbreak of the piano and broader structure of that song continues a bit later as well on “Reflections on Pond Ripple,” where Hackett’s flute arrangements are contemplative and melancholic—perhaps the album’s most obvious use of quiet distance in the recording and mix to accentuate each individual part to achieve a sort of thousand yard stare pensiveness. At every turn, SONGS FOR SLEEPING DOGS finds ways to strike a balance between the cinematic and the reflective. You can check it out over on Bandcamp!
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