Wednesday, May 15, 2013

TOTAL (VON) FEST WILKOMMEN BENJAMIN VON WILDENHAUS

Benjamin (Ben) Von Wildenhaus may be better known to the average Missoulian as the Federation X guitar player who doesn't sing, and who has a mustache. Certainly those are  important parts of the story, but the other parts are pretty interesting too. Ben has musical abilities and songs running pretty deep through his bones, and, and its varied, weirdo stuff that hardly packs easily into our unfortunately genrified vocabulary. A couple years ago he put out a fabulous record called Great Songs From Around and followed it up with a surprisingly excellent Christmas record, complete with Jewish, Pagan and a few other winter holiday songs.

Think of it as enhanced American primitive, if you can get over how bullshit that description sounds. It's music for space and space-creating music. Ben's played with country groups like the Quaalude Country Band, Miss Lana Rebel's Juanita Family and Friends and a pretty excellent handful of others you can read about elsewhere. It's a little druggy, kind of Touareg but mostly just kind of its own nicely meandering soundtrack.

We're going to do our danged-est to find a real mind-blowing place to put this.


Ben von Wildenhaus: The Limping Axeman from Riot Bear Recording Co. on Vimeo.


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