Spotlight On: Ben Cooper (Radical Face + Electric President)

May 14, 2011 at 23:27 (Artist Profiles)
Tags: ben cooper, electric president, folk music, radical face

Image courtesy of Radical Face

I had a great conversation last night with a small group of friends about children, art and the mesmerising and inspiring relationship between the two. It was a conversation I continued to have with myself long after I’d gotten into a homeward taxi, and still find myself working through now. My figurative “train” of thought has been going around in circles for a while now with the only truly clear piece of information I can take from it being that I subconsciously and automatically apply the music of Ben Cooper to any of those perplexing emotional flashes of enormity I get from thinking about my childhood.

I’d hazard a guess that what I’m trying to describe here is a fundamental aspect of the human experience. I am of course referring to that overpowering and insurmountable feeling of “epic” in your stomach triggered by the stimulation of some secret part of the brain that people forget about immediately between whole-hearted and absorbing intellectual returns to one’s childhood. I think it’s rooted somewhere near nostalgia, somewhere near mourning and equal distances from practically every other recognisable feeling in our repertoire. Perhaps it’s the sudden, wonderful and fleeting visit back to that head-space where everything was equally as possible as everything else, where the boundaries between fantasy and reality were more like curtains than walls. Or perhaps it’s just a bi-product of considering things in the context of an entire lifetime instead of the here-and-now- whatever it is, whatever it’s roots are, and whatever triggers it, I think we can all agree that it’s unpredictable and very hard to capture.

Ben Cooper is blessed with the precious gift of not only being able to capture this; but also of being able to conjure it. Whilst lyrically, Cooper is the master of dreaming up ways to summarise all the complex and impossible things you always wished you could find the words to say into beautiful and effortless passages, I feel that the majority of a Ben Cooper story is told compositionally. Cooper has only released one album under his solo moniker Radical Face, but has released 3 albums in a very similar vein through his band Electric President. Electric President was kind of pioneering that indie-glitch-electronica at the same time as Dntel (of The Postal Service fame), but really never strayed that far from acoustic folk-pop.

Radical Face’s debut album Ghosts deals with the concept of home, and memories and lives belonging to that space long after one physically parts from it. “Welcome Home” is a hugely successful track from it (which still seems to be picking up speed, despite being released in 2007), but the album is rich with songs that could have been equally successful as singles, but at the same time, plays well altogether as a complete start-to-finish piece (something Cooper really spends a lot of time and effort ensuring). “Glory”, “Wrapped In Piano Strings”, “Along The Road”, “Winter Is Coming”, “Homesick”; all of these songs will make you melt, but the remainder would too, to be honest. Read this article to learn more about Radical Face‘s upcoming “Family Tree” album trilogy which he’s been working on for some years now and should be out by the end of the year if things go to plan. Cooper records all instrumentation himself in his home studio, which, considering the layers to this music, is incredible in itself. Listen to him talk about it as well as the album and plenty more below, in what has to be the best podcast I’ve ever heard:

Electric President, although not being so tightly would around the concepts of home, childhood and bye-gone days, still evokes the same reaction. Why? Because that’s how Ben Cooper writes. His imagination is unlike that which you could ever hope to find again. His sophomore Electric President album Sleep Well was loosely focused on child-like fear, and the kind of nightmares you’ve forgotten how to have but distinctly remember having. In fact, the first and third Electric President albums are vaguely themed as well, and though stylistically varied, it’s still very easy to jump between albums- mainly because of the fact that nobody writes like Ben Cooper so when you hear it something of his, it feels familiar even if it doesn’t sound that way.

It’s worth heading to Cooper’s website and checking out some of the other projects he gets involved in. I won’t list them or describe them to you, but I urge you to listen to the song below which Cooper made only with sounds from his own body. Seriously amazing, and gives you an idea of his producing, sound engineering and compositional prowess- on top of everything else.

The latest offering from Cooper was a Radical Face EP called Touch The Sky which was put out last year. It’s mostly reworkings of old tracks, with a couple of new ones, but still- better than a slap on the belly with a wet fish. From it was this song and video “Doorways” which really summarises what I’ve been trying to communicate here well.