Reviews

Vital Weekly

Build Buildings is Ben Tweel's project for many years and although I haven't heard his more recent music (the last time might have been in Vital Weekly 634), I am always interested in his particular brand of electronic dance music. Much of what he does has to do with 'sound' and not much else, which is something I always like. No bullshit, just music. Tweel loves sounds; of clicks and clacks of pencils, chopsticks, scotch tape dispensers and candy wrappers. He samples them and then loops them around, plays with them, adds a bit of Rhodes pinao, acoustic guitar, upright piano, harp, mbira and harmonica - all of which are no doubt also sampled and made to measure to fit the beats he's already crafted and then he plays around with them until he has a three minute piece of music. Lots of 'intelligent' beats, whatever these are, more glitches and everything with a fair amount of warmth. A bit of Fennesz, a bit of Herbert (especially when it comes to sampling electro-acoustic sources, even when Build Buildings doesn't come with a grandiose political story) and Oval, but Build Buildings has a rather nice, playful sound; joyous even at times. With none of these pieces really long and a sufficient amount of variation this is one of the better albums I heard from him. It doesn't stay in much the same place but keeps moving around, from strength to strength. Not something to be easily found on the dance floor I guess, but it works well as background music in the modern household.

Another Dying Art Form

In the electronic music arena, there is always plenty of room for an artist that breathes life and consciousness into a typically bloodless genre. Ben Tweel grabs ambient bites and nips from the world around us and places it amidst automated throbs and synth accents creating gorgeous scenery with a sonic paintbrush. Build Buildings stands tall in a field that contains luminaries like Four Tet, Caribou, Gold Panda and Lone without pretext or exaggeration.

Textura

No instrumentation is listed on Ben Tweel's latest Build Buildings collection A Generation Of Books, but that's alright: listeners familiar with his previous work know that he's something of a ‘found sound' producer who generates his colourful electro-acoustic material from household items (pencils, chopsticks, scotch tape dispensers, candy wrappers, etc.) as well as sampled instruments whose natural sounds are de-familiarized via computer processing. For this concise, thirty-six-minute set, Tweel mutated real-world samples and instruments such as piano (electric and upright), acoustic guitar, harp, mbira, and harmonica into crisp beat patterns and song structures.

Packed with detail (“Argosy,” for example, is so rich, it could pass for a roomful of typewriters compulsively clacking at lightspeed), the twelve tracks are vibrant in tone and playful in spirit, and the impression left is of a person who not only delights in creating music but is happy to leave excessively ponderous music-making to others. With ample doses of crackle and clatter sprinkled across Twell's productions, it's hard not to hear echoes of the clicks'n'cuts era that now seems so long ago. That's especially true of “Demba,” where a rapid thrum of clicks is joined by stuttering textures that can't help but recall early Oval. Elsewhere, “Constructed Light” similarly builds itself up from a generous array of micro guitar fragments, while “Heavy Water” flickers with a downtempo lope that doesn't seem all that removed from something Ezekiel Honig might have produced a few years ago. Rather more uptempo is “Arctic Open,” whose found sounds-generated percussion works itself into a groove that's vaguely suggestive of beatbox and even footwork.

If there's one thing that primarily distances Tweel's tracks from the clicks'n'cuts tradition, it's his focus on melody and song structure. Yes, there's no shortage of whirr and click within a given Build Buildings piece, but such elements are deployed in the service of the song. One comes away from A Generation Of Books thinking of it as a melody-based collection of instrumental songs that just happens to be assembled from found sounds and treated samples.

Exclaim

In 2001, Christian Fennesz released Endless Summer, a magnificent representation of electronic music crafted from bits of processed guitar. (The title track of that album is beauty incarnate.)
 
Still, 14 years later, producers are trying to capture that lushness and weave it into their own worlds of sound. It's nigh on impossible, and Ben Tweel — in his Build Buildings guise — understands this. So, while he indeed nods toward the Austrian demigod with A Generation of Books, he manages to wring his own universe from his guitar/laptop palette. Serving up bouncy beats with lead-off track "May You Fall on Soft Ground," blasting off into glitch country in "Demba" and getting soulful on "Heavy Water," Tweel shows that he's capable of hopping in and out of any number of stylistic tropes with his clever music.
 
Sure, Christian Fennesz he's not; Tweel doesn't really care. He's happy — and successful — enough being Build Buildings.

Chain D.L.K.

Presented as an artist that "has been featured on radio, television and motion picture soundtracks" with a release inspired by "the clicks and clacks of pencils, chopsticks, scotch tape dispensers and candy wrappers" turned "into crisp, compelling beats", I was used to the idea of concept driven album closer to sound art. Instead it's a from of "glitch pop" trying to stay in equilibrium between experimental and pop music.

The "compelling beats" of "May You Fall on Soft Ground" are balanced by a quiet melodic line. "Earth of the Fish" is a quiet ambient track while "Demba" is rekindled by the glitches. "Tea Tree" is based on catchy loops. "Constructed Light" features juxtaposed filtered guitar riffs while "Filament" is hypnotic with his use of reverberated samples. "Heavy Water" is a gentle tune based on resonances while "Artic Open" is the most complex track with the unstable beat in a dialogic plan in opposition to the quiet development of the melodic line. "Bookless" is based on a quiet loop with the juxtaposition of sparse sample while "Argosy" starts to develop an almost complex rhythmic pattern upon the soundscape and "Healthy Bones" applies this procedure to the samples. "Pasteboard" closes this release with the synthesis of the characteristic of the previous track.

This album is so well constructed as it's void of any personal musical trait so it sounds as a sort of dj set of the genre. Fans of this label will love this release but it could be disappointing for the others.

dMute

L'artwork du disque en question le laissait doucement présager par son graphisme rappelant celui de certains albums d'Oval: Ben Tweel, l'homme se cachant derrière le nom Build Buildings, est un fin connaisseur du courant glitch et il le prouve. A l'écoute de cet album d'electronica délicate dans la continuité de ceux qu'Oval produisait auparavant (Dok en 1998, Scenariodisk en 1999), on se dit qu'il en connait à n'en pas douter les techniques sur le bout des doigts et en maîtrise les subtilités à la perfection.

Le glitch est ce genre musical créé par Markus Popp dans les années 90 qui s'appuie principalement sur les parasites sonores que sont par exemple les sautes de CD, les crissements et autres distorsions liées à la numérisation de données. Il s'agit alors de produire, en assemblant ces accidents sonores, une forme informe de beauté mélodique. Ou, dit autrement, de créer des mélodies belles car volontairement défectueuses, les accidents étant toujours "programmés".

En une douzaine de fragments courts et minimalistes, A generation of Books fait défiler ses micro-harmonies en les passant à travers un mixeur dont on aurait remplacé les lames par des algorithmes informatiques découpant et recollant le son à leur guise. Si l'album de Build Buildings ne propose rien de foncièrement nouveau, il garde néanmoins pour lui une certaine préciosité grâce à sa faculté à reproduire le meilleur suc de ce que l'on avait tant aimé dans les sonorités grésillantes d'Oval.