Maps and Echoes

They recorded the EP like a furtive confession: four songs, two days, a suburban strip-mall studio that sat ten minutes from the house he’d finally stopped flying away from. The room was ordinary in the way that matters: good walls, decent microphones, someone who knew how to catch the air in a take, and Alex Benjamin treated it like a small theater. Morning light pooled across the console, the players arrived with coffee, charts, a quiet hunger. There was no gilding, no time for indulgence. That constraint, he says, was the design principle: make decisions now or watch the idea die under the weight of better options.

Benjamin’s career has been the kind of apprenticeship the road affords: nearly two hundred dates a year as a sideman, a drum chair here, a keyboard there, shaping other people’s songs until he could feel the seams. The skill this taught him; to parse a song from the inside, to know when a note is doing the work of a feeling, is the engine behind this small record. But becoming the composer and leader requires something else besides craft: timing, confidence, and a geography that lets you sleep in your own bed. California did that for him this year. The itinerant life taught him to listen; living local finally gave him permission to speak.

That speech is economical. The record sits between passport stamp and photograph: travelogue compressed and room-bound, a map made of resonant objects. “Goodbye Blue Monday,” the EP’s opening payoff, began not as a showpiece but as a fifteen-minute Hammond sketch. Years later, an iPhone video of a friend picking the melody on a twangy guitar convinced him the song belonged to restraint. He stripped it down. Where a sideman might be asked to expand, to stretch a jam into spectacle, Benjamin chose the opposite: the fewer the notes, the more room for the listener to arrive.

There are moments on the record that are entirely literal translations of landscape into pulse. “Gunpowder Falls/Interlude” was born at three in the morning, a house at the edge of a Durham wood, a train gone by, Alex fiddling on a Strat tuned to open D and recording a riff into his phone. The demo had a dripping quality; in the studio he told his band to imagine water falling, and when he counted it out the riff sat in 5/8. Nature, he points out, has meters: the river has a swing, a staggered insistence. Those shapes, a balsam fir at Christmas, a midnight train, a creek mic pumped through a PA at a festival in Oregon, are compositional material as much as chord charts. He borrows forms from Steve Reich’s phasing as casually as he borrows the Amen break’s propulsion, then buries them in the modesty of an acoustic guitar so they feel like memory, not lesson.

That is one of Benjamin’s quietly radical moves: he treats influence as buried architecture, not storefront signage. Sacred Steel’s ecstatic pull, pedal steel’s cry, a horn-section rhythm that surfaces by accident in an organ jam — these voices live in his toolbox, sometimes stitched deliberately (“drum machine meets pedal steel”) and sometimes colliding into something that feels inevitable. Phil Cook brings the gospel tissue to the sessions; Justin Mazer arrives with odd-time voicings that almost make the demo the final take. Chris Boerner and D. James Goodwin are guardians of the room sound, their technical tasteful enough that Benjamin can trust the recording to hold the space he carved.

Recording live, in two compressed days, meant that production choices were part ritual. Alex wanted players to show up, cut, and eat lunch like a Carol Kaye anecdote. He admired the old-school cadence of machines and hands: players arrive at ten, play until three, take a breath, keep going. He joked about wanting Carol Kaye on bass (she declined, enjoying retirement), but the point held: the right hand in the room changes the record’s oxygen. That trust is how a take breathes; it is also why he panicked for ten hours after day two, caffeine and adrenaline and the odd grief of letting something go unfinished. The panic was also evidence. Making something urgent is exhausting; it is also the way you sometimes get truth.

Benjamin’s production math is both small and cunning. He reveres tiny decisions such as a a plate reverb on a snare, a shabby Radio Shack mic on a tom, or a tape simulator slipped quietly under a mix, because those touches suggest time and human failure, the textures that digital perfection tends to iron away. He and Tyler Thompson used tape emulation early in the process to catch the warmth of his grandfather’s cassette-dubbed movie soundtracks; the effect is anecdotal but it’s also the difference between a performance and a recording that lodges. “Room mics,” he says simply. It’s your ear, not the gear.

Vinyl tightened the dramaturgy. Choosing a 7″ forced him into short-story pacing: accessible payoff on Side A, an interlude that guides you, and a closer that echoes the midnight train tucked into the demo. The format was not nostalgia so much as economy. “Everybody has twelve minutes in their day,” he reasons, and with that minimal time he wanted a whole emotional arc, a miniature journey in which silences and small dynamics took on the weight of plot. The constraint nudged restraint: the songs could not be loose, could not be indulgent; they had to earn their silences.

Geography is a seasoning in Alex’s imagination. Portland gave him a taste for arrangement and a kind of audacious experimentation; Durham sharpened his clarity and soul; Philly offered that raw basement-show DNA. He reads cities like tone colors, and festivals: the peacock-farm Northwest String Summit comes back to him with the force of a parable, are scenes where late-night jam sessions, creek microphones, and serendipity widened what instrumental music could mean. He remembers crying straight through Todd Snider’s set there, watching sound crews pipe the creek into the PA, and then, in the morning, hearing banjo where he had not expected it. Those fingerprints are on the EP: a banjo’s shadow here, a lapsteel drone there, an organ that remembers basements.

The EP is fully instrumental, which is a deliberate invitation. Without words, narrative becomes architecture: melodic gestures, the way a guitar vibrates against a fretboard, a left-hand drone on organ that suggests place. “It’s easier for me,” Alex says of instrumental storytelling. He values the listener’s agency, the space for someone to bring their own map. He wants his music to be a doorway, not a manifesto: resilience, tranquility, and the imagining of place are the kinds of images he hopes will arrive in a listener’s head. He’d be pleased, he says, if someone heard the EP and then walked to Gunpowder Falls in Maryland, letting the river do the rest.

There’s another thread here; a humane compositional ethic. Benjamin resists the ego of the jam scene even as he honors its gifts. He remembers the buffet of sounds that drew him in as a teenager: Medeski Martin & Wood, Robert Randolph, the Slip, and how that world offered a place to be young and hungry. But he’s also done with cliques where soloing becomes an arms race. What matters now is collaboration with humility: bring people into your sphere, let their particular powers change the thing you started. He’s adamant that he does not want to be the kind of auteur who plays everything; unless you’re Prince, that singularity often rings like loneliness.

For the future, Benjamin wants to stretch the same principles into other languages: film and television cues, longer forms, perhaps vocals guided by other lyricists, a string quartet arranged by a friend. He aims to play more instrumentation himself next time but wants the excitement of contributions from musicians who add their grain. He also hopes to write pieces that stand away from him, to test whether a composition keeps its clarity when others carry it; the ultimate measure of something that is truly his.

On the day the EP was finished he stayed awake and then panicked, the way artists will when letting go of work they have tendered to public ears. But if panic is the price of leaving an unfinished room behind, the record’s small victories are evidence that the gamble paid out: a brief, urgent document of place and practice, a leader’s first step that honors every sideman lesson he’s paid for on the road. The songs are maps and photographs at once; the midnight train in a melody, the balsam fir in a drone, a river mapped into 5/8, and they summon the listener not merely to hear but to enter.

Benjamin’s EP is not a manifesto. It is a threshold he has built: a modest, deliberate arrangement of sound that asks you to step through and imagine a place you might already know, or want to find. He wants you to carry your own map with you. If the record guides you to a river, to a peacock farm, to a morning coffee beside a strip-mall studio, then it has done its work. The rest, he says, he’ll keep trying to make; one short, true recording at a time.