Ben Shirken - H.D. Reliquary
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Ben Shirken - H.D. Reliquary
Holdrons Arcade
135A Rye Lane
Unit 11 Holdrons Arcade
London SE15 4ST
United Kingdom
Label: 29 Speedway – 29S07
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: US
Released: Apr 11, 2025
Genre: Electronic
Style: Abstract, Ambient
Ben Shirken's debut album as Ex Wiish arrives on his own 29 Speedway imprint — and H.D. Reliquary is the kind of record that earns its conceptual framework by making the concept audible. The title refers to the hard drive as a sacred container for relics, exploring how digitally archived fragments of existence can persist after death. It is a rich and genuinely unsettling idea, and Shirken — a founding member of free jazz group Nu Jazz and the curator behind the 29 Speedway performance series — has the musical intelligence and collaborative depth to do it full justice.
Eleven tracks blend acoustic instruments — trumpet, violin, upright bass, cello — with electronic elements including Max/MSP and modular synthesis, the boundaries between live improvisation and machine-generated material deliberately blurred throughout. Bespoke, resource-light neural networks generate MIDI information and audio that interact with live performances from collaborators including Pavel Milyakov, MIZU, Dorothy Carlos, Kevin Eichenberger and Muein, among others. The result is music that feels both deeply human and quietly alien — fragmented, spectral and absorbed in questions of memory, mortality and the strange afterlife of digital data. A remarkable debut.
