Watershed, by ben kamen

Watershed

by ben kamen

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"Watershed" cassette on white with 5-panel artwork and complete lyrics! Only 150 copies available.

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1.	Stellar's Jay 04:09	lyrics
i’m ok. i’m half awake, still holding to the shape of a memory. the rotted trees all graffiti’d green. unmade debris lines the watershed. i’m watching the lights go by. my soul’s awake but my heart is all veins, and i’m not the same, i’m gonna make a change. i’m watching the lights go by. i’m ok. i’m half awake. a stellar’s jay alights from a powerline.
2.	Eloise 03:20	lyrics
eloise, help me with this memory. i can see only shapes, dull shades of things. there’s smoke in every room. magnolia pink with bloom. i’m watching from the garden. eloise, help me name this melody. can you see to keep the dusk away from me? i stumble in the darkness. i’m from another place. as empty as a pocket still holding to the shape of every thing i’ve lost. eloise. glittered ashes in the street. i believe in nothing but the end of being and carry on regardless.
3.	Purple Shadows 03:51 video	lyrics
close your eyes so i can see the scars that purple shadows hide from view. unfold your hands so i can trace the lines, so i can trace the lines that guide you. days repeating in the dark, it's keeping me awake. i’m ready to go. through your eyes i go back in time. yellow, black, and white statues smiling. now my heart is beating, but my hands are cold, are my lungs constricting? the days will repeat into the dark, still keeping me awake but i’m ready to go close your eyes so i can see the scars that purple shadows hide from view.
4.	Great Wave 04:24	lyrics
i contrived a way to deny your power: weigh the canopy; name every leaf and every stem. feign desire, grief. resolve to keep away from me what i’m keeping away from you. i’m wide awake. a great wave that didn’t know better. try to describe the light, to assign a pattern. each conifer manifests grey echoes in silhouette. a great wave, my mind has changed. you should’ve known better. a great wave. i’m wide awake. you should’ve known better, but you did it anyway, you should’ve known better.
5.	Unknown 03:52	lyrics
underneath the leaves the damp unknown unbreached moss falls like rain to my lips. i will live a thousand years and never have to decide, in all this creation, which patterns survive. i bleed to the sea from the northern star, bound and returned unharmed.
6.	Watershed 00:42
7.	Make Believe 04:45 video	lyrics
make believe a river borne of a thousand streams: a make believe identity. make believe a canyon hollowed beneath your feet. always dig in, never retreat. i know where i stand. make believe devotion’s a bullet in the chest. make believe a bulletproof vest. with the water rising, suspended disbelief dragging soiled wake between your knees. i know where you stand. .. dive under a chair. shut behind a door. hear a primal shout “we will never back down!” a riot shield. hiding in fear these final hours. whispering in my phone “nancy, where are you?”
8.	Reflect Darkness 04:39	lyrics
two limbs bronze and oxide green statue cast in your relief gathering white from the water. the architecture of the river. cascading ridges of sand walk the dead water shed. hold no faith in the memory. a record spinning on repeat. i’ve got to stop with this feeling. earth: echo thunder. reflect darkness. call to collect on every debt, every time.
9.	All Faded 04:37	lyrics
all faded, cut the moon out from the smoke-light sky. all faded from the summertime. though it feels impossible to find a place to hear the wind that's safe to feel the sunlight, I'm wading back up the river's blight resting my head on the wet cement tonight, waiting for the end to come. sit up awake and stare towards a house that bleeds with smoke. in a world beyond repair waiting for the end to come tonight

about

ALBUM PREVIEW by SOPHIE KEMP

Over the past two decades, Ben Kamen has created music for a variety of formats and genres — from chamber music to multi- channel sound installations to folk and post-rock. Originally from Ohio, Kamen has lived in Olympia, WA since 2006, where he teaches electronic music composition at The Evergreen State College and develops musical instrument apps, including the drum machine “Patterning.”

After a decade-plus of time away from writing and performing his own songs, Kamen started writing again during the early part of the pandemic. Eager for a new sound palette to work with, Kamen took up the alto saxophone and the banjo, two instruments he approached with a beginner’s mindset and willingness to push outside of their idiomatic uses through studio experimentation.

It took over two years for the explorations to coalesce into an album. Part of that had to do with health issues—Kamen started losing his voice, and a doctor confirmed that he had a paralyzed vocal cord. “There is a lot of grief involved in receiving the news that the thing you’ve been putting off doing for the last decade might be unattainable. I suppose the flip side of that grief was the resolution that if I gave up, I would be giving up permanently.” On Watershed, Kamen learned how to sing again.

What transpired is a record of lush songs with Kamen’s voice an instrument as important as a synthesizer or a guitar. The saxophone became an oscillator, treated like a module in a synthesizer that could be layered and processed into a texture. He strummed the banjo through delays and reverbs to create haunted chords.

Look no further to see the results of these experiments with timbre than “Make Believe,” the first song to be written for the record. The song has a heavy, repetitive bass-line in an odd-meter, and Kamen takes the saxophone, pitch-shifts it down to double the bass, giving the song a dense, mossy texture, while electric guitar and saxophone layers harmonize in an ominous melody.

“Throughout the writing of the songs that would become Watershed, I was taking daily walks through a trail near my house that winds through a temperate rainforest, full of old growth trees, ferns, and communities of fungus.” The record’s thematic imagery were strongly informed by this environment. Watershed became a record that negotiates with the death and decay and beauty that exists within nature and in human life.

Watershed is also a study in memory, how we hold on to the past, how we let it go. Music, after all, is a memory device, a collage of fixed moments in time. During the final stages of making the record Kamen participated in a songwriting workshop with Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold. One of the first slides in his lecture read “certainty is necessary, but always temporary.” That state of mind laid the groundwork for Watershed’s lovely “Purple Shadows,” a song that captures a brief moment in Kamen’s relationship with his father, just months before he passed. It’s a song that grapples with memory in its most explicit form.

Kamen performed, recorded and mixed the record himself at home, enlisting Josh Bonati (Sufjan Stevens, Jenny Hval, Amen Dunes) as a mastering engineer.

Watershed will be available on digital formats on July 15, 2022.

credits

released July 15, 2022

written and recorded by ben kamen, january 02021 - april 02022 at monkland, olympia, washington, usa, on land stewarded since time immemorial by the Steh-Chass Band of Indigenous people of the Squaxin Island Tribe.

ben kamen sings and plays acoustic and electric guitars, electric bass, keyboards, banjo, alto and baritone saxophones, modular synthesizer, drums and electronics.

mastered by Josh Bonati

Special thanks to friends who lent instruments, ears, and assistance along the way : Zoë Torres, Rebecca Kamen, Eric Sarai, Eleanor Murray, Adam Pearson, Josh Kane, Megan Rue, Aaron Weaver, Ajai Combelic, Matt Mehlan, Kristen Brandon, Dr. Kari Ragan, Peter Randlette, Sam Gray, JP Misheff and I'm sure many other people who I'm forgetting.

Dedicated to my family and friends.

In loving memory of Alan Kamen

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about

ben kamen Olympia, Washington

Over the past two decades, Ben Kamen has created music for a variety of formats and genres — from chamber music to multi- channel sound installations to folk and post-rock. Originally from Ohio, Kamen has lived in Olympia since 2006, where he teaches electronic music composition at The Evergreen State College and develops musical instrument apps, including the drum machine “Patterning.” ... more

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