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Robbie Bennett Steloken

“I want the music to be like you’re walking through an unfamiliar place you want to keep exploring and never have to circle back to where you started.” That’s Robbie Bennett talking about his two double albums, Steloken and Circulation, which bring his spacious, emotive instrumental meditations to life. On Steloken, Bennett welcomes us bit by bit into a land full of warmth and fuzz, using piano, keyboard synthesizers and a polyphonic, microtonal synthesizer called the Soma Terra. Circulation takes the meditations of Steloken one step further, widening the range of Bennett’s real-time compositions. Together, Steloken and Circulation - named for what Bennett’s daughter calls skeletons and the calm, meditative state where you can feel your blood flow - capture the cycle of creation in real time, pouring out in the moment.

The genesis of the music comes from the equipment Bennett uses as keyboardist for storied Philadelphia rock band The War on Drugs. Armed with the keyboard rig he uses on tour, Bennett decided to send MIDI from an acoustic player piano into an Oberheim OBX8 synthesizer, allowing both instruments to resound at once. Naturally, Bennett tracked each layer live whenever possible, piano and keyboards followed by synthesizer and programming, moving from the idiomatic to the wild. In fact, Bennett describes the Soma Terra as “completely wild” - perhaps because it’s built into a stump of wood. “I was able to react in real time with this instrument that is so expressive and mysterious to me. You can play it almost like a keyboard,” Bennett says, “except it has a gyroscope in it that alters the pitch, and pressure-sensitive sensors. It can go from atonal noise to beautiful, deep, warm chords.” As Bennett explored the instrument, he realized he was making one record - and then, two.

Even though he recorded the two albums in his basement studio at home, the music sounds and feels otherworldly - both warm and ghostly. Throughout, Bennett mixes the element of chaos with classical counterpoint, impishly returning to themes as crystalline as your great-grandma’s fine china, but blanketing them in synthetic haze. It’s like sipping tea in fog. Piano and synthesizer might intertwine like vines, as on Steloken introductory track “Radii” and lead single “Sister.” The music might move from a haunting synthesizer introduction into an anthemic, faraway piano melody, as on Circulation lead single “The Light on Your Face.” Bennett’s synthesizer might appear in his piano microphones, its vibrations reverberating through the wood of the piano while he plays. On Circulation, you might notice wisps of Fender Rhodes and vocoder peeking out. And while Bennett finds new worlds through music, because of the intimacy of his studio space, you might also hear the dryer beeping, the family’s soft footfalls, the dog trotting overhead.

On Steloken and Circulation, Bennett revels in the dare of exploration, stays open to the mystery. After he finished the albums, he says, “I sought forgiveness for a lot of what I did. Like, oh, it’s okay to make wordless music; it can sound this dark; it can be this chaotic. It’s tempting to mute what’s ugly and what makes me feel uncomfortable, but the full spectrum of the mistakes and the triumphs feels most real and beautiful.” Its playful, focused exploration; openness; and expression make Bennett’s solo work vital.