Benfay - Replay Life

Benfay plays and repeats, just as the four seasons, every sunrise, and the next beat in a 4/4 bar repeat themselves. In Benfay’s music, bass and beat are the circulation. Melodies and samples are subject to this circulation, but don’t always comply with the rules.

Discussing his album, Benfay recently commented, “Replay Life is the reliving of myself in my own music”, in an interview given to his cat Jimmy, aka GinGin. With Replay Life, Benfay does not want to dive into the depths of his musical style or reinvent his world of music. He plays and repeats. In so doing, very personal details of his own soundscape emerge. The music has a doleful essence and the beats pull at threads reminiscent of bread surfacing from a sea of fondue. The organ plays in reverse and, like Schubert’s Leiermann turning the wheel of his organ behind an empty begging bowl, so Benfay’s hard disks and turntables spin. Is there a spark of hope? Oh no, that is quickly erased with kitschy clichés, broad chords and grandiloquent synthesizer textures. Replay Life is the opening page of Benfay’s musical diary, written with guitars, violin, double bass, samples, synthesizer and left and right mouse button.

The genre into which Replay Life most closely fits is abstract Hip Hop. The element of distorted digital and analogue tone colours pervades the entire album. Benfay works primarily with hardware from Akai (MPC), Allen&Heath (System8/16), Casio (CZ1000), Dave Smith (Evolver, Prophet8), Doepfer (A100), Korg (Zero4, Electribe), Moog (Little Phatty), Neumann (TLM103), RME (Hammerfall), Roland (RE-501), SSL (Duende), Universal Audio (Solo610, UAD), Waldorf (Blofeld) and Yamaha (DX7).

© & ℗ 2009 by Benfay & Everest Records

Spotify iTunes Buy

Replay Life

Release Date : September 27, 2009
Artist : Benfay
Catalog ref. : er_027