Roomful of Ghosts is a new collection of songs from singer-songwriter Samm Bennett, just released from Polarity Records. The 12 songs feature a shedload of curious and unexpected sounds from a mind-boggling array of percussion, stringed instruments, jaw harps, mouthbows, synths, toys, gadgets, junk... whatever it took to get the job done! Bennett's songs are alternately (or sometimes simultaneously) whimsical, introspective, vaguely optimistic, darkly pessimistic, arcane in their allusions or crystal clear in their simplicity. Like life around the planet on any given day, they run the gamut of human expression. Stylistically, his music is perhaps best described as a meeting of African-inspired rhythms with melodies that harken back to American folk forms and blues. Imagine the rhythmic playfulness and invention of musicians like Tom Zé and Hermeto Pascual combined with the melodic stylings of Skip James or Roscoe Holcomb. ******************************************************* SAMM BENNETT BIO, in his own words: I was born in 1957 in Birmingham, Alabama. I wanted to be a drummer from the age of 6, when I first heard Ringo. Just a few years later, hearing Mitch Mitchell drum on Hendrix's "Fire", well, that clinched it. I banged on the drums (or any other likely object) in every free moment from then on. In 1977 I moved to Boston, and fell in with a young musical crowd there that was discovering music from all round the world: African, Brazilian, Balinese, Carribbean... I was a voracious listener, and became inspired as a percussionist to widen the rhythmic vocabulary. In 1980 I made an epic voyage to Africa (overland across the Sahara desert, hitching rides!) and lived in Nigeria for six months, learning some drumming and soaking up the vibrations. I moved to New York City in 1984, and started playing with many of the improvising musicians that were starting to build what became known as "the downtown scene". I did a lot of playing, recording and touring with folks like Tom Cora, Ned Rothenberg, Elliott Sharp, George Cartwright and many others. I also put together a sort of pan-cultural rhythm unit called BOSHO, with Kumiko Kimoto, Yuval Gabay and Hahn Rowe. What we were doing in those days was referred to as "experimental" or "avant garde", but I always thought of it as, well, folk music, really. I was just another untrained musician (that's right, never went to conservatory), following my instinct and playing music that I loved, and trying to eke out a living doing so. At the same time, I was developing a desire to write songs and sing, and in 1990 I formed a band called CHUNK, in order to do just that. We released our first album, (Life of Crime) in 1991 on the Knitting Factory label. Two more of my song releases followed: The Big Off (1993) and History of the Last Five Minutes (1995), and we did a number of Knitting Factory tours in Europe and North America. My song work, right from the beginning, was characterized by a sonic and rhythmic vocabulary rather unlike that of most other "singer-songwriters"... I've been told that I didn't fit in exactly anywhere, and, well, I suppose that was true! Still, with the recording and touring, the 90's were a reasonably good time for my music, and we gained a few fans here and there! By 1995 I was ready to move on, and Tokyo (a town I'd visited, and come to love, on some previous tours) beckoned. I'd already worked with Japanese musicians like saxophonist Umezu Kazutoki and guitarist Uchihashi Kazuhisa, and of course started working with many others from Tokyo's abundant and varied music scenes soon upon arriving. I formed the group SKIST with vocalist and soundmaker Haruna Ito, who also happens to be my wife. We've released two CDs, (Ellipsis and Taking Something Somewhere) on our own Polarity label. For the first few years in Tokyo, I completely put aside my songwriting and singing: just wasn't feeling it, I guess, and other musical avenues needed exploring. But around the turn of the century I started once again jotting down lyrics that popped into my head, and a few years later I realized I'd amassed a stack of notebooks full of songs. In the last couple of years I've started performing them, sometimes with other players based in Tokyo, but more often as a soloist. And of course, I've started recording them as well. I've just released, on the aforementioned Polarity label, a new collection of songs, entitled ROOMFUL OF GHOSTS. Barring unforeseen obstacles, I will be releasing many more such collections in the months and years to come. Hope y'all will find a little time to listen! ************************************************** Author, lecturer and cultural critic Mark Dery has just published his ruminations on Roomful of Ghosts on his blog Shovelware. Reprinted here... Roomful of Ghosts, the new release from Samm Bennett, is pure awesome, a sob and a chuckle and a whoop and a yowl, dredged up dripping from the mucky riverbottom of his bi-cultural bad self. ("Bi-cultural" because Bennett, an ubiquitous presence on the New York downtown music scene of the '80s, was born in Alabama, studied African percussion in Nigeria, and lives in Tokyo.) now the mayor tried to shoot me and the governor called me dumb but the president gave me a banjo string and a piece of chewing gum how do i love thee baby i'd like to count the ways but all the reasons they keep going in and out of phase Call it slumdog gagaku. Or gutbucket p'ansori. Or a black cat moan wrapped around a lonesome train whistle, cured in Tokyo fog and nailed to some grotesque African fetish, deep in the swamp dark. If that's too clever by half, let me just say that I love the unvarnished honesty of this stuff; the pensive moodiness of "I Burned This Song"; the heart-stoppingly beautiful stillness-in-the-middle-of-a-fast-moving-boxcar vibe of "Until You Kiss Me"; the loping, hypnotic gait of "A Thousand Rhymes." And the lyrics! They're uncut brilliance, reminiscent of the electroconvulsive blues of Captain Beefheart or Rauschenberg's droll "combines," Pop art mash-ups like "Monogram" (you know, the stuffed Angora goat with the tire around its middle). They're a distillation of Robert Zimmerman (the Robert Zimmerman of "Fixin' to Die" and "The Ballad Of Hollis Brown" and "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"), swirled together with essence of Robert Johnson and the John Lee Hooker of "Tupelo", a jigger of Southern gothic (Flannery O'Connor, James Dickey, Harry Crews), and a dash of Ralph Stanley and Roscoe Holcomb, spiked with a shot of Bennett's obscure wit. Drink straight up; rinse, repeat as necessary. the wolverine is ticklish so keep your fingers on the badger's tail there's a card game going in the back room you could win yourself a bucket of snails put the caterpillar back on the abacus take the monkey off the astrolabe here's a bone from the tombs of the cappuchin monks dip it in your coffee babe None of which really gets at the buried roots of the thing, because Bennett's narrative voice is inimitably his own, and this reflexive rock-critical habit of describing an artist's work by concatenating a string of references or influences (largely imagined) is too often a self-serving display of the prodigious (!) sweep of the critic's own frame of critical reference, or a desperate attempt to say what something is by saying what it's not. On Roomful of Ghosts, Bennett manages to fashion something truly new, truly his own, out of the American idiom, and more specifically out of the Southern Experience (he was born and raised in Birmingham). Bennett's music incorporates shaky, hand-held footage from his dream life; archetypal images from the blues; the rhythmic singsong of Southern speech (white and black); and the backwoods hoodoo of the Mythic South, as well as the equally eerie placelessness of Alabama's geography of nowhere: the chain stores and big-box outlets and strip malls full of little mom-and-pop operations that have crawled there to die, fleetingly glimpsed in the blurry footage of the video for "Until You Kiss Me." see that alligator head i got it down in new orleans it keeps smiling at me as i sleepwalk through my scenes that big old toothy grin i think i know what it means cause i used to ride that train i used to ride that train Do I feel as if I recognize the images in Bennett's impressionistic little vignettes because they're landmarks on some Mapquest directions printed out from the pop unconscious? They remind me, obliquely, of post-mortem daguerreotypes and William Eggleston's color snapshots and an abandoned house I pulled off the road to explore, in Maryland, a long time ago, and the tour-de-force passage that ends Thomas Harris's Red Dragon, a meditation on the ineffable Otherness of nature, set in Shiloh on the shore of Bloody Pond. But why compare? Is that the only way we can express that which cannot be effed---by forming a tag cloud of allusions around its empty outline? Isn't that a tacit admission of language's inability to pierce through to the essence of anything, especially music? Or just one erstwhile rockcritic's belated confession that he always did lack what the best music writers have, that Lester Bangsian ability to channel the music through typewriter keys? One last try: Roomful of Ghosts is somehow like Robert Frank's cover for Exile on Main Street and somehow like Wisconsin Death Trip and somehow like Brother Where Art Thou? and somehow like nothing at all. Which is, of course, the whole point.