RLR Review & Ocean Music

Brian Carroll, who edits the Boston folk blog Red Line Roots, happened to be in the audience when I played in Burlington, VT the other night. He wrote a nice review of the show here:

Red Line Roots — Show Review: Ben Cosgrove at Light Club Lamp Shop (Burlington, VT)

Photo by Brian Carroll / Red Line Roots

Also: I wrote the piece in the video below when I was working as the artist-at-sea last month with Schmidt Ocean Institute on board R/V Falkor (see the previous entry on this page for more about that). The ship constantly monitored its speed through water and its speed over ground, and because trillions of gallons of water lay between us and the sea floor, the two speeds were never quite the same. I built a piano piece around the variance between those two changing rates of movement (each of the pianist’s hands is mapped to one of the two speeds), in the hope that by doing so I could highlight the profound influence of this incomprehensibly huge layer of liquid on both our forward motion and our relationship to the ground.

I’m generally obsessed with place and with motion — they have been behind almost all of my music for the last several years — but until I found myself in the middle of the ocean, I’d never been anywhere where those two things were so hard to understand or reconcile with each other.

For more about the kinds of things I was thinking about as I wrote this, you can check out the blog posts I wrote for SOI while on board their ship: they’re here, here, here, and here. And if you click through to the YouTube page where that video is hosted, there’s a slightly longer essay there that talks a bit more about what went into the piece.

All that stuff aside, I like how this thing came out, and I hope you like listening to it. And I’m enormously grateful to SOI for giving me the opportunity to make it.

Upcoming shows:
10/30 MONTPELIER, VT – The Skinny Pancake
11/4 COLEBROOK, NH – Tillotson Center
11/10 SOMERVILLE, MA – Arts at the Armory (with 90-Mile Portage)
11/11 BURLINGTON, VT – Radio Bean
11/12 STOCKBRIDGE, MA – Six Depot
11/13 MANCHESTER, NH – The Currier Museum – Opening Event: “Mount Washington: Crown of New England”
11/16 YARMOUTH, ME – Gather
11/17 SALEM, MA – The Gulu Gulu Cafe (with 90-Mile Portage)
11/22 PORTLAND, ME – Blue (with Max García Conover, Griffin Sherry, & Rattlesnake Arm)
11/23 SOMERVILLE, MA – PA’s Lounge
11/27 MONTPELIER, VT – The Skinny Pancake

-B