Ben Shemie^CA/QC

Ben Shemie — A Single Point Of Light

With a background in experimental performance and classical composition, Ben Shemie hails as lead singer and guitarist of Montréal art rock outfit Suuns, whose four-album run over the last decade has tactfully blurred the lines between jazz, no wave and Krautrock. In Suuns, Shemie excels at giving complicated elements space to breath and coalesce into a maximally effective freakout. Likewise, Shemie's solo pursuits involve performance-based experimental sound practices that integrate freeform excursions and more structured compositional music — veering into classical, radio art and new technologies. 2019's A Skeleton, is a starkly visceral experimental pop album dipped in corrosive acid—constructed from live experiments on the road and recorded in a single-take with no overdub, it nods to both 80s minimal wave and malfunctioning trip-hop beats. Shemie's second solo LP is 2020's A Single Point of Light, entering a broader musical universe focused on the concept of perception. Eleven tracks of dream psychedelia present an immersive world cloaked by a dark atmosphere, with Shemie’s striking voice as the sole thread holding the precarious thing together.

Shemie brings an intimacy to each track through a masterful manipulation of every piece of the soundscape. At MUTEK 2020, Shemie will breathe life into his primitive electronic configurations, infusing icy synthetic sounds with a spontaneous, sun-bleached warmth.

Lurching with synthetic grooves, Ben Shemie’s lo-fi psychedelic textures careen across genres boundaries, producing pop music at the outer edges of harmony. There’s a sense of enormous potential in his avant-garde, cavernous rhythms - songs that are unpredictable yet strangely familiar.