Bleep

Press Release

Quicksails is the recording project of Chicago-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Billington. Central to the Chicago experimental scene and its various veins across the midwest and national DIY circuit, Billington has been championing freak music of all stripes for over a decade at this point. He has performed as a member of numerous ensembles including ONO, ADT, Circuit Des Yeux, Tiger Hatchery, and Ryley Walker’s band. In an improvised setting, he has collaborated with a stable of musicians including John Olson (solo and with Wolf Eyes), Rhys Chatham, Mark Shippy (US Maple), Owen Gardner (Horse Lords), and Paul Flaherty. Billington’s role as a producer at Chicago avant epicenter Elastic Arts and his co-curation of the venue The Hideout’s long-running Resonance Series has paired future-facing acts from around the world with Chicago’s finest to enrich the city’s thriving progressive music scene with stimuli of the highest, headiest order. His work with Chicago non-profit foundation Experimental Sound Studio has grown recently to include a lead role in their series The Quarantine Concerts, setting up diverse bills of international luminaries for live-streamed concert events.

Billington’s approach on Blue Rise foregrounds his palette of modular and digital synthesizers, resulting in a strain of Quicksails music that brims with shimmering textures and lush, layered harmonies. More than a full-on pivot to another style, Billington enters into a complementary mode of production that highlights his melodic sensibilities and his ear for sophisticated DAW-based composition, shifting into another natural step along the wide arc of his musical trajectory. Each track on Blue Rise unfolds as a self-contained world replete with fluctuating tiers of fine-grain synthetic tones that morph in real time as they stack together into dense systems of polyrhythmic activity or smear into passages of all-consuming drift. Billington lays out a menu of contrasting sentimental spaces and self-contained sonic tableaus, each of which refracts the sun’s light out across new directions and terrains. The album cements Quicksails not only as a master synthesist and arranger of far-flung sound sources, but as a composer attuned to the time dilating properties and the instantaneous emotional impacts of the zones that he lays out before us.