To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on October 27th, 2023. CD packaged in a mini LP jacket. C40 – purple cassette with full color labels and artwork by David Russell Stempowski. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.
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Chicago-based producer/multi-instrumentalist Ben Billington makes music under the name Quicksails. A pillar of the Chicago experimental scene and its branches across the midwest and national DIY circuits, Billington has enriched his communities through overlapping roles as a musician and curator / promoter of freak sounds for more than two decades. In addition to his work as a solo artist, he has performed with bands such as ONO, ADT, Circuit Des Yeux, TRAYSH, Tiger Hatchery, and Ryley Walker’s band, and has collaborated in improvised settings with a bottomless roster that includes John Olson (solo and with Wolf Eyes), Rhys Chatham, Mark Shippy (US Maple), Owen Gardner (Horse Lords), and Paul Flaherty. Billington works full-time as the Assistant Director at the Chicago nonprofit Elastic Arts, a venue which serves as a haven for performances by international luminaries of free jazz, multi-channel sound art, and avant-garde music of virtually every variety. Over the years, he has helmed programming for Chicago venue The Hideout’s Resonance Series, Chicago institution Experimental Sound Studio’s series of virtual shows under the banner of The Quarantine Concerts, and the DIY noise festival Voice of the Valley along with its subsequent incarnation as Big Noise Candy Mountain. Through his integrated social and musical practices, Billington not only has given a platform to a generation of adventurous artists in the Midwest and beyond, but has established a wide network of mutual musical influence that directly informs his own work and feeds into the music of the friends that surround him.
Billington’s solo recordings as Quicksails encompass everything from free jazz-inspired electro-acoustic production to rhythmic synth-pulse tapestries to music focused on what could be considered one primary instrument among the many he works with: the drum kit and auxiliary percussion. Surface, his fifth release to appear on Hausu Mountain, combines all of these idioms into one diverse program while also expanding his palette to rope in his more recent experiments with touch-sensitive custom synthesizers and modular systems. The album follows the Quicksails LPs Blue Rise (HAUSMO100, 2020) and Mortal (HAUSMO52, 2016) and the tapes The Bright (HAUSMO76, 2018) and Mugen – Volume 6 (a split with Head Boggle, HAUSMO21, 2014). Surface shimmers with a sense of tonal sophistication and emotional resonance that sets a high-water mark for the Quicksails project. The album’s mind-bending juxtapositions of electronic and acoustic sound sources of contrasting fidelities charge each composition with energies at once alien and familiar — rooted in free improvisation and jazz traditions while streaking off into realms of lush synth arrangement, and textural abstraction.
Billington orients each piece on Surface around a rhythmic foundation of fast-morphing electronic tones that veer closer to precedents in the 20th century classical avant-garde canon, channeling the likes of Morton Subotnick and the artists under the umbrella of the San Francisco Tape Music Center or Ina GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). Against his jittering grids of unpredictable electronics, Billington colors in each production with other sounds from his wide arsenal. Live drum kit performances in the vein of free-jazz careen octopus-style from rapid-fire snare rolls to cymbal rushes. Fragments of sampled vocals creep in as disembodied laughs and spoken word. More tranquil swathes of synth drift into view and establish their own harmonic networks that evoke the meditations of Popul Vuh. Within Quicksails’s dense fields of sound, one voice stands out with particularly bold contrast: the saxophone of modern experimental stalwart Patrick Shiroishi (Fuubutsushi, The Armed, a multitude of improvised collaborations on labels like Astral Spirits and Touch Records), who guests on three of the album’s ten tracks. Shiroishi’s sax performances alternately burst out in squalling atonal spirals and glow with neo-noir melodicism as if glimpsed in the smoke under a streetlamp on a darkened city corner. The moments when Shiroishi and Billington lock together into lush harmonies on “All of Alex” — dedicated to dear friend and Chicago underground mainstay Alejandro Morales, who passed away in 2021 — prove among the most affecting, as multi-tracked sax performances melt their yearning tones into webs of consonant synth arpeggios and warm keyboard chords. The collaboration between Billington and Shiroishi perfectly suits the missions of both artists and many of their contemporaries working at the intersection of experimental electronics and avant-jazz: to blur the lines between these traditions and point out that they all emerge from the same primordial impulse to chase new possibilities of spontaneous creation and unfettered human expression.
Speaking on the context of Surface’s creation, Billington explains:
“This music was written starting in 2020 once the global pandemic had already gotten underway and wrapped tracking in 2022. The obvious international upheaval had an energy influence, but there was strong love at home and within my community that worked its way into the writing. We had a long tough struggle with a sick and eventual loss of a pup, I lost one of my best friends, the world was seemingly on fire, but a lot of people stepped up beyond their usual capacity to spread kindness, share their art, check in with loved ones / strangers and put extra energy into the universe. We were/are all bobbing on the surface, doing our best to get by. Head above water, breathing when we can.”
^^photo by Ricardo E Adame
^^Quicksails and Patrick Shiroishi
