Georgia singer-songwriter Ben Bostick doesn’t acknowledge any appreciable disconnect between genres – they’re all intertwined, lines of melody and rhythm intersecting and influencing one another. Admittedly, his previous albums were primarily focused on Americana’s rural movements, but you could hear the effects of other musical histories imprinting themselves into the structural architecture of his work. He built towering landscapes out of folk and country genealogies, finding common ground between countless melodic inspirations and the presence of innumerable foundational memories.
However, on his forthcoming album, Become Other, he completely shifts the functions of creativity, leaning into a genre-hopping perspective which allows him to wander far afield of his usual aesthetic. His roots are still there to guide him, but the resulting album is a testament to his ability to wring honest emotion from any artistic perspective. This shift in approach was set in motion by his reaction to hearing AI-driven music: “One thing AI can’t do is produce things of real meaning. It can only produce facsimiles of meaning.” And so, he decided to cut all ties to specific genres and just embrace the wild spirit of creation.
Become Other is a concept album of sorts, with the story centering on a protagonist who is confined to a place called The Tangle and who experiences a metamorphosis and finds himself reborn in the World Without Measure. Comprised of four movements, the record is quite dense, as its theatrical nature finds realization through personal revelation and affirmation.
You can hear this dramatic shift in perspective on Bostick’s new single, “Flying High”, a track that equates the process of using prayer as a means of enlightenment to the high you get from consuming any number of elicit substances. Blending the R&B wooziness of How to Dress Well with the echo of Dilla’s more measured sound experiments, the song is an amorphous glimpse into the blended sonic geographies that Bostick has canvased as he sought to develop the album’s unique personality. The music subsumes you before carrying you aloft in a narcotized haze of measured psychedelia with Bostick’s voice doused in waves of mechanized hues.
Bostick explains: “The narrator engages in a prayer, “May I never leave this reality…” His prayer is to be allowed to remain in a place he knows isn’t real. Just let me pretend my way out of The Tangle, forever. The music of this song transitions seamlessly into “GNTL HZ,” which uses the accompanying figure of verse 2 from “Flying High” as the bass line. That figure is transformed at the end of “GNTL HZ” into the musical foundation of “Eyes in the Vines.” This transformation is meant to evoke the evil twisting of that ecstatic high into the dark paranoia that follows. And that is just one of many more meaningful, symbolic musical connections in this movement.“
Listen to the song below.
Ben Bostick will self-release his latest album, Become Other, on June 13. Follow him on Facebook and Instagram.
