Earnest experimental solo album -- by voicelight

Album cover above is downloadable

Release date: distributed December 15

Artist: Sound Animal (female, solo -- Rosemary Bensko)

Location: Berkeley, CA

Contact: flameflower@runbox.com

Tracks: 16

Music: Female voice singing lyrics, non-lyrics, speaking, and vocalizing with ever-explorations of new territory, over a combination of unexpected physical and synth instruments. Most music is progressive through-composed fugue motifs with layers of polyphony inhabit a world lush with reverb. Sound Animal is known for venturing outside the fences into areas not reserved for humans: this is not just music: this is life.

Genre: Experimental, though accessible. Breaks trip hop, future synth, and a bit of rock.

Moods: Standing up for rights, feral, soaring, whimsically playful, liminal lullaby, intensely celebrating being alive, eerie, lonely, exotic travel, dystopian, poignant

Suggested DJ: Experimental and college radio stations

Cover image of "A Life" self-portrait of Rosemary, 2022, Berkeley.

About the band:

Sound Animal is the artist name of Rosemary Bensko, though when speaking about her contributions, she often uses the abbreviation SA to make a distinction between herself and the band. It's primarily a one-woman band, Among around 200 songs so far under the Sound Animal moniker, around twenty-eight are collaborations with men in California, France, the Netherlands, and Poland. A few of those are joint ventures, but otherwise, SA produces all the tracks entirely. Sound Animal also features on many other bands' recordings.

There are no public performances but plenty of radio shows, such as at Stanford's KZSU, Parish News, and It's Psychedelic, Baby! podcast. Sound Animal is hired to create a soundtrack for a slow burn psychedelic psychological suspense horror movie and a complex dystopian video game, and is open to further scoring and track licensing.

Links:
SoundCloud

Bandcamp

Instagram

Facebook

 Codes available upon request.
 

"The standout single, See No See, Know No Know, from the disarmingly compelling California-hailing artist Sound Animal will awaken senses you never knew you had. " -- Amelia Vandergast for A&R Factory coverage

With Schecter bass

With hand drums, including a disembodied snare played with knives

Sound Animal, Berkeley

Does this strangely anomalous album outside time capture the isolation that has befallen so many of us, in which moments begin to blend together, and no distinctions matter, and what is what anyway? Voices cry out unexpected things, hidden even from themselves inside stone walls, or screaming naked from the trees. Dream characters and animals cavort together. We are gaslighted, told to only believe "the news" and not feel, hear, see, or say what is real. Unless we rise up. Rise up and see farther.

Description:

These are sincere, earnest songs that arise from a deep love of the harmonious ways of nature and distrust of human deceptions.

Most of the songs present with an instrumental foundation carefully composed, accessible, relatively normal, though progressive, influenced by future synth, trip hop, a bit of galloping rock, and even elements of pop -- and then that glories in destroying itself. It messes up the settings with unexpected tones and deliciously deviant inappropriate virtual instrument choices. Tracks of acoustic melodica and flute, or synth, audaciously riff off the innocent melodies, having their hedonistic way with them. New potentials for vocals are ever-explored in unforeseen directions song by song. Drone layers take over.

Vocals carry scintillating emotions even when wordless, and some explore the range of creature calls like dolphins, horses, a duck, an otter, and a woman who is her own animal. Some pieces tell poetic stories, like "Be My Spider of Delight." Others, like "See No See" and "Rise" are sincere anthems against censorship. The moods range from eerie witchy, through joyfully playful, to operatically dystopian. 

Background: I was trained as a singer when young, traveling around the state to win competitions with German lieder and modernist works, and I also had a silver flute scholarship. I later taught myself to play piano by regularly traveling to a nearby mountain to visit an empty chapel built into a boulder, where the doors remained open. I play an inordinate number of instruments besides those, including guitar, bass, Thai khaen, Indian punji, Greek double shepherd's flute, drum kit, and many more. I produced the album in Berkeley.