Ben Vida

Ben Vida is an American composer, recording artist, and leader in the experimental music community. He also earned a master’s degree in fine arts, and his installations have been featured at exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. Vida was born in 1974, and he began playing the piano and trumpet as a child. Around the age of 13, he started playing the guitar and discovered that he could write his own songs. Later, he befriended Milo Fine, who introduced him to the music of Xenakis, Morton Feldman, and Derek Bailey, which made a lasting influence. Vida earned his B.A. in music from Webster University, St. Louis, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Bard College. While attending Bard, he co-founded the minimalist quartet Town and Country, who released their first album in 1998. He was also a member of Pillow, Terminal 4, Singer, and he performed alone as Bird Show. In addition to improvisation, he also started experimenting with psychoacoustics and otoacoustic emission. This is related to overtones and resonant frequencies that can occur inside of the inner ear, which produce physical auditory tones. Vida utilizes this phenomenon as a unique voice in his compositions. By 2006, Town and Country had released five albums and an EP, and in the 2010s, Vida had art exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Krakow, and Berlin. Around 2018, he began experimenting with the concept of expanded, or long-form, composition. Influenced by Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, Vida’s Reducing the Tempo to Zero takes nearly five hours to perform. This extreme duration challenges the ideas of form and structure, since the average listener will only experience a portion of the performance, redefining the perceived beginning, middle, and end of the piece. His 2023 release Beat My Head Hit features a collaboration with the percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire. ~ RJ Lambert, Rovi