"Hubble Drums" Track List:
1. Nude Ghost
2. Glass Napkin
3. Hubble’s Hubble
Hubble Live!
November 19th @ 285 Kent Ave in Brooklyn, NY *
* = w/ Driphouse, Man Forever, Psychic Ills, DJs Dutche Germ (Tim Dewit), the Oracle (Sam Hillmer)
About Hubble Drums
Planned since Hubble's first live performance in September of 2010, Hubble Drums is an inspired record of new guitar music. Equal parts shred-fi, cyber-dread and fried psychedelia, Hubble Drums marks Ben Greenberg's first full-length recording and debut for Northern Spy.
Recorded at Python Patrol and lovingly mastered at Bonati Mastering,
the CD and 150g LP features original artwork by Michael Yaniro and Ben
Greenberg.
“Hubble's Hubble” serves as the soundtrack for a video of NASA sanctioned cosmic imagery captured by the actual Hubble Telescope.
Possibly the most minimal track, Ben produces sheets of sound that
circle through 3 channels, panning left to center to right, creating an
aural environment that reflects the space and movement of deep space.
“Nude Ghost” is based off the first tapping riff that Ben wrote when
creating music for solo guitar. The glacially emerging beat mixed into
the track came from two days of hazed studio jamming with Joe Williams (White Williams), Jon Leland (Janka Nabay, Skeletons) and Matt Papich (Ecstatic Sunshine).
"Glass Napkin" highlights Ben's mastery of both guitar tone and
hypnotic rhythmic patters, as well as his energetic patience in the face
of a void of his own devising.
Since the inception of his new solo guitar project, Ben Greenberg (also of Zs and Pygmy Shrews)
has sought to exploit the guitar for its ulterior qualities,
simultaneously displaying a true love for the instrument while
redefining how guitar music is understood. Whether distortion-drenched
or achingly clean, Ben describes painstaking result as “cyber-dread”, an
apocalyptic, beat-less quasi-electronic music, conjuring Terry Riley’s
pulsing minimalist structures and Gregg Ginn’s aggressive, avant-garde
rock.
About the Hubble live performance, Ben expounds, "Every Hubble
set, on a stage or in a friend's basement or in my bedroom, is a
concerted effort on my part to change the air in the room, to push it
towards a state of greater resonance.” Using mesmerizing guitar mastery
to create extended rhythmic patters of note groupings of varied tempo,
dissonance, and harmony, Ben hypnotizes the audience with slowly
developing, subtle variation, until the listener is lulled into a highly
vivid dream state. The set varies between a versatile and simple
set-up and the more ambitious Hubble Superposition, a quadraphonic
experience that splits the guitar signal into four different signals
which are routed through four separate amplifiers.
Ben’s first release "Hubble Linger" (NNA Tapes) brilliantly
utilized the cassette format by distilling a live performance into two
side-long pieces of stereo-panning guitar. The tape was well received
inciting electronic musician Keith Fullerton Whitman to claim
“...I’m fairly floored by this extended solo-trance-out from Zs
guitarist Ben Greenberg, who seems to have invented a device that halts
time (musical, actual, and meta-physical) ; its use is put to great
effect across this 60-minute blast of cycling “stereo” chord
progressions and assorted haze(s) that approaches the fervour of MBV /
Belong’s filtered-out high-gain wash while retaining the minimalist
patina of Charlemagne Palestine piece ... awesome.”
"At once heady and visceral, psychedelic and intensely lucid,
Hubble's mesmeric guitar webs are laser-etched incantations to the
sublime. At the luminous crossroads of John Lee Hooker and Philip Glass,
this is virtuosic and visionary sound-sculpture that kicks the concept
of what is music just a little further down the road. There is something
new under the sun. Just listen." - Michael Azerrad
“Hubble's euphoric wheedlechurn is where the measured precision of
downtown minimalism meets the unhinged aggression of Brooklyn loft
noise--truly hypnotic and truly New York.”
- Christopher R. Weingarten
“I’m fairly floored by this extended solo-trance-out from Zs guitarist
Ben Greenberg, who seems to have invented a device that halts time
(musical, actual, and meta-physical) ; its use is put to great effect
across this 60-minute blast of cycling “stereo” chord progressions and
assorted haze(s) that approaches the fervour of MBV / Belong’s
filtered-out high-gain wash while retaining the minimalist patina of
Charlemagne Palestine piece ... awesome.”
- Keith Fullerton Whitman
“[Ben] has been channeling his formidable guitar chops into
distortion-drenched, loop-based compositions that lovers of distressed
ambience will be more than happy to zone out to.”
- Emile Friedlander, Altered Zones
"His new instrumental solo project, Hubble, finds Greenberg maniacally
noodling through celestial, finger-tapped riffs with little more than a
guitar and a basic loop station. It’s a touch more accessible than his
past work, and allows his well-honed virtuosity to shine through." - The New Yorker
"When you watch [Hubble] perform...one of the most striking things is
realizing how excited you are to watch someone play guitar that can
really fucking play. And makes rad, new music!!!" - Terroreyes.tv
For more information, visit:
Hubble on Facebook
Hubble on Twitter
Mission Hubble Blog
www.northern-spy.com
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