French label Shelter Press releases an extraordinary collaborative album by Ben Vida, Yarn/Wire and vocalist Nina Dante.

American composer Ben Vida (Dubuque, Iowa, 1974) has teamed up with chamber quartet Yarn/Wire and vocalist Nina Dante to record The Beat My Head Hit, a stunning album recently released by Shelter Press. Founder in the mid-nineties of Town and Country, a chamber music ensemble specialising in minimalist music, Ben Vida has also worked under the name Bird Show and has been releasing albums regularly since 2000 on labels as varied as the German PAN, the Portuguese iDEAL Recordings, the Italian 901 Editions and the French Shelter Press, which has released The Beat My Head Hit.

The music on this album, completely minimalist in structure and repetitive almost to the point of obsession, stands out for its “prayerful” use of the voice (or at least it seems so to those who are familiar with the Catholic prayer of the rosary, with which it bears curious similarities). It is a musical expression of piano, percussion and vocals, modest and serene, intimate and sublime, experimental and intimate, all seemingly contradictory images, a hypnotic display of the materiality of language that emphasises the rhythm of speech through repetition and variation, like a kind of vocal music experimental album, but without the experimentation of Meara O’Reilly, Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara or Cathy Berberian.

The Beat My Head Hit contains five pieces and was recorded between New York and Sydney in 2021, from a 2018 Vida performance for four voices and electronics held at Brooklyn’s BAM alongside Nina Dante, Brandon Lopez and Jessica Pavone. Mostly serene and soothing in mood, the second piece, Rhythmed Events, at 12:26 minutes long, is the one that offers a most interesting counterpoint of tension: a deep, resonant piano is disrupted by dry percussion and the monochord tone of slightly shifting voices. The other, shorter compositions, Who’s Haunting Who Here, Drawn Evening, The Beat My Head Hit and Still Point show a fusion of vocals and deep piano reverberations that recreate a series of extremely terse and delicate melodies.