Benjamin Hauptmann – Lekker
Eastside Radio’s album of the week is Lekker – by Benjamin Hauptmann
While guitarist-composer Benjamin Hauptmann has included a small number of guest musicians on Lekker, it’s best viewed as a personal diary – a singular forthright voice. Hauptmann is a formidable guitarist whose credits spread across the genre spectrum from Blue Juice, Lior, Gurrumul and Katie Noonan to jazz trumpeter James Morrison. Almost entirely self-recorded, with a heavy emphasis on programming and digital synths, if there is a key collaborator here it is mixing engineer Lee Groves, who balanced and polished the collection of home MIDI programming and live studio overdubs. Any instrumentalist as standout as Hauptmann could be forgiven for simply outputting the simplest possible display of their talent (guitar wailing over top-notch session band anyone?) but anyone who has seen him in control of a performance or band will know Hauptmann has always displayed a strong instinct to compose and produce music with a broader view.
For anyone looking for a shortcut introduction, Hauptmann can be reasonably well understood if you skip straight to the final track of Lekker, ‘Eastern Country’: entirely self recorded, a combination of live and programmed instruments, and a rich meandering texture of rhythm, ambience, melody, skillful improvisation all within a composite of rock, asian and jazz timbres. Whilst digital synths, programming, and other phenomena of the early digital age are undoubtably part of the current reboot trend in pop, it’d be hard to argue that the sounds on Lekker are a deliberate or even accurate recreation of some bygone era in music fashion, nor are they particularly derivative of the current era of synth-based pop.
Curious for more? Preview the wordless vocal number ‘Delhi’, featuring Katie Noonan. Noonan’s ethereal voice in combination with a bell-like patch might lead you to believe you’re in for an abstract-like emotional soundscape, but soon a driving backbeat (played by drummer and brother, James Hauptmann) and moog-like bass lead us into a fairly epic journey, conjuring in my mind images of some cosmic flythrough video… or maybe an iTunes 1.0 visualizer window.
Hauptmann tends to stretch the cycles in his songs, the effect being that more often than not you are lead through shifting scenes by an uninterrupted rhythmic train built either by rock-solid drumming (replacing or complementing programming on most of the tracks) or rolling, layered synth or guitar riffs. In this context the standouts for me are ‘Salad For Now’ which grooves in a gloriously childlike manner until deconstructing into some kind of delay supernova, and ‘Shuffle Over’ for it’s sheer brawn and unapologetic attitude, topped with satisfyingly audacious solos.
There’s a number of ways Lekker will appeal. For example, if you’re looking for ‘progressive’ music in any sense, if you’re a fan of ‘fusion’ or virtuosity, if you’re attracted to digital timbres and interested how they might be applied outside of mainstream dance or atmospheric styles. Conversely if you need to hear traditional-minded songwriting, or any kind of ‘roots’-derived aesthetic, you probably won’t find what you want here. What I’ve found is Lekker is an ingenious and dramatic ride, a deft examination of the spectrum of Ben Hauptmann’s musical ambition.
Tune in to Eastside Radio 89.7 throughout this week as we play tracks from this exciting collaborative album and for your chance to win a copy!