 Hopscotch the Opera |  Pencil |  Banff International Workshop |
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 Pencil |  Stray Dog Song |  Still a pencil |
 Dancers with Desert Quill Quarte | Hey look a pencil! |  Toronto overlooking Banff |
Pencil |  Write. Write. Write | Pencil? |
 Ben |
Other Collaborations
The Performer-Composer Residency at the Westben Centre for Connection & Creativity
It has been my great honour to be the Creative Director and a co-facilitator of this residency since 2018. I began this with good friends, co-facilitators, and CalArts alumnx Sarah Belle Reid and Davy Sumner. Over the years, the team has grown to include co-facilitator annais linares and members of the Westben staff, and othes.
The idea of the residency is that it is a place for sound makers of many backgrounds and ages to gather to make music, build community and exchange perspectives. We have welcomed over 150 participants from many countries and have launched many new works into the galaxy!
You can check out some of the digital work on Westben's Digital Westben or visit the PCR website here to apply or find out more.
Sounds of Silence
This was a blast. A wonderfully fun and emotionally far reaching show. On July 13th, 2023, Mayu Funaba (piano), Sarah Belle Reid (trumpet + fx), Ian Wright (drums) and myself on bass teamed up with ET the mime for an exploration of sketches and improvisations.
We also played an original film scoring to The Red Balloon and a piece for a beautiful friend who will be missed, Steve Dagg, entitled 'Corners we Know' set to his images of Trent Hills.
SOUNDBOUND!
Throughout August/September 2022, I invited annais, Sophie, Joe and Reza (fellow musicians in the Critical Studies in Improvisation program at the University of Guelph) and Chris, Michelle, Marika and Christa (environmental facilitators of Guelph's Arboretum) to walk, learn and play together in Guelph's Arboretum.
In September, We created a public event called SoundBound!, which began with participants going on one of four 30-minute guided walks with one of the facilitators, and returning to the Arboretum centre for a 1-hour concert of music by the band.
The music came out of the band's reflections on the walks that participants had just gone on. Each musician led a collaborative process for each piece. The concert took place at sunset, and we had popcorn, tea, and blankets.
Together we explored questions like: How might we listen and play with the outdoor mentors all around us? The trees, pollinators, water. What are some ways we might engage in projects of ecological restoration, both big and collaborative and in our backyards?
Ephemeral Pond
digital walk and improvisation
Ben Finley - double bass
annais linares - voice
Reza Yazdanpanah - tar
Michelle Beltran - naturalist
We learned so much from Michelle's enthusiasm and knowledge about this precious spot in Guelph's Arboretum. The area around the boardwalk swells into a pond as the seasons change—a beautiful prompt to make music with!
This video was co-created for the IF (Improvisation Festival) 2022, hosted by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation and in partnership with the Arboretum at the University of Guelph.
This was such a memorable and soul nourishing experience! My cousin Logan—a brilliant pianist and music educator at the Heart of Riverdale Community Centre (the Heart)—invited annais and I up to Whitehorse for a series of improvised collaborations with local artists/collectives from various backgrounds. The premise was basically starting from a 'blank' slate with our collaborators, finding whatever resonance we could in our time together, honouring and working through our present interests and different experiences, and that became the 'documentation.' We also did a concert at the Heart sharing what emerged from our collaborations. It was a beautifully enriching experience. We also facilitated four elementary and high school co-creation workshops that explored similar forms of co-creation, encouraging them to share their own forms of expression and offering a few starting places/games. I'll never forget the warmth of this incredible community—and the beautiful land. Thank you Whitehorse + thank you to the Heart, The Fire Hall of the Yukon Arts Centre, the Yukon Art Fund, Junction arts & music, and the Canada Council for the Arts for your support of the project!!
In the pandemic, Jim Harley invited Judit Csobod, Marcela Echeverri, Erin Felepchuk, Brent Rowan, Carey West, Reza Yazdanpanah and myself to participate in a project where we would each video elements of our pandemic life as a solo audiovisual response to field recordings he had taken, and then we would each turn respond and add to each others!
It was a blast. It was a lovely and fulfilling challenge listening and playing with each other's locations and lived realities.
First video was me playing with a bunch of frogs Jim had recorded and the second is with the whole band's contributions. I had a great time doing the video editing for both. You can see the others here.
In the summer of 2019, I had the privilege
to go to the Summer Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation in Québec's spectacular Gaspésie.
For our culminating event, I wrote a suite of pieces composed for duets and landforms called 2+1=3 with participants the program.
The idea was to have a conversation at the performance site with the artists, and from there start sketching fragments based on how they resonate with the place.
Aftwerwords, a whole other adventure emerged of writing liner notes for this piece in essay form which considers the roles of musicians and artistic institutions in the environmental crisis. You can read them on the writing section of my site here.
I'll be forever grateful to have been a part of the Industry's opera Sweet Land (playing D-violone with FX), an internationally acclaimed, collaborative, multi-perspectival opera; composed by Du Yun and Raven Chacon; libretto by Douglas Kearney and Aja Couchois Duncan; directed by Cannupa Hanska Luger and Yuval Sharon; and an incredibly open, loving, risk-taking, orchestra crew and cast.
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"The Arrivals wash up on the shore. They make contact with another civilization they call “the Hosts.” And from there, the story splinters, following diverging perspectives. Starting as a procession through the LA State Historic Park, Sweet Land becomes an opera that erases itself."
'Mehahn' is a transdisciplinary work by Chris Ryan Williams exploring the temporality and ephemerality of memories of loved ones. Drawing inspiration from Gertrude Stein's 'landscape theatre' and the collaborations between avant-garde trumpeter Bill Dixon and contemporary choreographer Judith Dunn.
Here's me improvising for Jacques Burtin's film "The Marvelous Path – Journey to the Heart of Improvisation," a piece based on that spends duets with musicians in Canada, the US and France. In the excerpts above, I explore with Jacques the the Tarot of Marseilles card's of "Justice" and "The Hermit".
Camera: Stephen Dagg and Jacques Burtin.
Improvised at the Westben Centre for Connection and Creativity (Campbellford, Ontario - Canada), July 2018.
Thanks to Andy Thompson for loaning me the bass!
Friend and collaborator, Davy Sumner, was selected as an artist-in-residence at the Santa Monica Mountains National Conservancy, a division of the National Park Service.
He facilitated a site-specific, quadraphonic composition/improvisation where I played bass with Chris Ryan Williams, M.A.Tiesenga, and Davy in a resonant & abandoned 10,000 gallon pool at Peter Strauss Ranch.
Santa Monica Mountains
National Park Residency Performance
"My piece fostered interactions with the natural sounds of the space—birdcalls, insect noises, and the distant highway—rather than covering them up."
- Davy Sumner
DREAMSCAPE 2018
Directed by JONGHEE WOO
with the Dream Walker collective
Thmele Arts in Hollywood
"DREAMSCAPE is a new multimedia artistic attempt to integreate art and technology, incorporating video, sound, dance, theater, and liver performance in order to capture true liveness and creativity. The main concept of the project was originally inspired by John Cage's Variations VII" - Jonghee Woo, visit his site for more
DREAMSCAPE 2017
Directed by JONGHEE WOO
with the Dream Walker collective
Long Beach PUMP Festival
Amazing to be a part of this ambitious "mobile" opera. I'm also very excited to have played bass in Galileo with new music by Andy Akiho. Check out the Industry website for more information:
Check out Turtle Feet Simple Growth by Patrick Behnke on New Branch Records!
Very happy to play on this project!
CaBiN at the Blue Whale
Nick Hon - Drums, contact mic
Chris Williams - Trumpet & FX
Ben Finley - Bass & FX
Thanks to Laura Sophia Perez for video!
This was an extremely exciting challenge. I played the part of Garcin, the lead character in Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit". The other two main characters, Inez and Estelle, were played musically by two violins .
We were forced into "hell's waiting room" with music and spoken language directly confronting each other to be each other's torturer... Musical adaptation by Sean Hayward.
A Musical Retelling of Sartre's - No Exit
Prokofiev Quintet G minor, Op. 39 (1924)
Really fun to play some standard chamber music with these great musicians. Hope to do it again soon with full dancers.
Performed at the CalArts Chamber Music Concert Oct 2016.
Rivulets
Rivulets is a quartet (sometimes quintet) of bass, viola, rhodes and voice.
This live excerpt is a piece of mine called Retrospective Photography and was premiered Oct 2016 at Battery Books, Los Angeles.
Also very excited to compose / perform on Sam Icklow's Film The Moth with Rivulet. Find his site here. Official Selection for the DTLA Film Festival!
Pox Films
- Three Blind Mice
After contributing a dimly distant piano song to Nick D'Agastino's incredible stop animation "Ring Around the Mulberry Bush" (see left), we are currently working on a new piece called "3 Blind Mice" (see images above) for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, bass, piano, organ and hybrid percussion. I'm very excited to bring this to life; we are working on making the music deeply interwoven with the elements of the film. It's a story of re-incarceration set in the turn of the century; it's a connecting piece of America's currently crowded closed loop prisons to its past overt history of disenfranchising. It's been great to work with Nick on every element of subtlety: character colours, light, motion etc.
ALSO! Blind Mice, Nick's film that has been 3 years in the making, is nearly ready. Very excited about the interweaving of the music with the film's sound design and the deeper sonic network of characters that emerges. Check it out at the following festivals:
Sundance
Berlinale
Atlanta Film Festival Cinequest
Tribeca
and will be submitted to the following festivals among others:
Annecy
Hiroshima Int. Animation Festival Ottawa Int. Animation Festival Canne
TIFF
Zagreb
Locarno
Telluride
Slamdance
Desert Quill Quartet
Desert Quill Quartet is a quartet made up of 4 corners of North America: Toronto, Detroit, Los Angeles and Mexico City. Somewhat an expansion on a traditional string quartet with an extended range in both directions, Desert Quill Quartet explores original music ranging from microtonal structured improvisations to reinterpreting Mexican folksongs to collaborations with dancers.
Tetherball
Tetherball is a trio of Nick Hon, drums, Caleb Veazy, guitar and Ben Finley, double bass. Loosely composed, melodic cells gives a fun challenge of developing variations as an ensemble. Rough pockets of beautiful.
Tuning and Instruments
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EUPHORIC 5 String Fretless
Eric and I first met in high school where we played in a rock band together called Needless Riot.
Now he's an expert woodworker, overall crafty creative and very talented guitar luthier who doesn't naysay any of the loftiest electric bass concepts I throw at him.
I'm the proud owner of his first electric bass, a beautifully carved, ambitious 36" 5-string fretless with a signature scroll. It is one of the most evenly weighted basses I have ever played and it has a huge range of tone potential.
Eric and I are currently brainstorming about a 5 string fan fretted bass with carbon fibre and wooden components with double stop hipshot tuners on every string. And of course it can trigger effects through embedded motion sensors!
Find out more about Euphoric Guitars and Eric's work here
I also participate in the practice of tuning in 5ths. I find both the double bass and the electric bass are extremely receptive to this tuning. There is an unmistakable resonance that opens up the instruments to rich overtones, clear harmonics and access to larger intervallic possibilities
To find out more about tuning in 5ths click here
I also participate in the practice of tuning in 5ths. I find both the double bass and the electric bass are extremely receptive to this tuning. There is an unmistakable resonance that opens up the instruments to rich overtones, clear harmonics and access to larger intervallic possibilities
To find out more about tuning in 5ths click here