On "Salt," his first studio recording in three years, landscape-influenced composer/performer Ben Cosgrove pulls back from the lush orchestrations of 2014's "Field Studies" in favor of a stark, quiet, and graceful sound that relies heavily on his idiosyncratic piano work to explore landscapes of inconstancy and ambiguity. “This is music about places where the land tends to come and go: marshes, rivers, tidal estuaries, salt flats, floodplains, frozen lakes, places where earthquakes happen,” Cosgrove explains. “I wrote this music after a pretty wrenching breakup, during a time that was characterized by a lot of pain and confusion: everything often seemed to be all tumult and motion, and it wasn’t always obvious to me which way was up or down. The way I worked through that was by writing music about landscapes with characteristics that, for me, resonated with those sensations." Cosgrove found himself composing music about places where that sense of unrest and instability was reflected in the landscape: “I took several simple little interrelated, shifting melodies and knocked them around a bit to try and explore this idea. Sometimes, it can feel as though everything is collapsing, nothing is still, and you can’t seem to plant your feet, but it can be useful in those moments to try and take comfort in that ambiguity, or just to remember that the ground moves, too.” “Champlain,” the new record’s opening cut, considers the fragility of the surface of a vast, frozen lake. “The places this record goes after the first song are sort of calamitous and fraught,” says Cosgrove, “but this opening is more to establish an initial feeling of a growing awareness that you’re standing on shaky, impermanent ground, however solid it may seem or how beautiful it may be.” More about SALT: - Red Line Roots, May 1, 2017 www.redlineroots.com/2017/05/ben-cosgrove-shifting-landscapes/ - Sound of Boston, May 15, 2017 soundofboston.com/album-review-salt-ben-cosgrove/ - Junction Magazine, April 2, 2017 junctionmagazine.com/first-listen-champlain/