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Dean De Benedictis has a bed, but does not sleep. He is a man made out of electricity, with creativity siting in his chest like a burning sphere. Forever battling convention, the current of his energetic imagination is released throughout Salvaging the Present (70'09") - an album wandering in wonder across nine stormy stories in electronic sound. Knowing that people both crave the new, and fear it, De Benedictis works out an appealingly ingenious mix of mammoth forces, minor exaggerations, and modish pranks - all in service to an ample cosmological orientation and awareness. De Benedictis is a technologist, still moving faster than the wave. The mental machinery he used to realize Salvaging the Present effectively imagines glowing sonics and grooves, as well as it does dreamy thought zone tones. From out of the middle distance, sounds, wider than they are high, emerge and ascend. At the margins of perception, a pixie-dust lightness, then the immense sigh of gracefully deformed metal. In a moment of somnolence, we envision night-blue sky - in the layering diaphanous tones of breathing strings and ethereal choir. Restorative sunlit notes offer balance, when velvety dungeon hues of dread become too much to bear. Why can not men better appreciate the present? The invisible now... We find with Salvaging the Present an openness to each and every moment as an opportunity to create something new - and the hope to have renewed, our faith in the potential we carry within.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 23 February 2017 |
