Introducing Ben Vince, Your New Favourite Avant-Garde Saxophonist

I've been lucky enough to know Ben Vince for a few years now. Back when we both lived in south-east London, his irresistible gravitational pull as a producer and a promoter was already so great that after twice moving house we still somehow ended up living on the same street. Such is the powerful attraction of this neighbourly avant-garde saxophonist.

Since then his reputation as a unique experimental musician has only grown. Through a deep receptivity for a sense of space and environment in his performances, Vince has surprised audiences with his mature and transcendent sound, melting uninitiated faces after an impromptu support set on Boiler Room for Japanese noise godhead Keiji Haino . The online audience's reaction ranged from the quizzical ("Is this Deep House?") to the boldly declarative ("This is so psychedelic").

When we met last week, even my corny suggestion that he should stand in front of a chrome-bumpered muscle car to pose for a photograph was given his thoughtful artistic credence (and gracious sympathy). Here, amongst the dull hoards of battered Toyota Space Cruisers, I chatted with Ben at his home in Tottenham about improvisation, performance, and the release of his upcoming LP.

It's almost exactly a year since Vince released his ten-track cassette The Purge with Hackney label Blank Editions. Some of the tape's more frantic and looping aspects have loosened in Vince's recent live performances and recordings, leaving more mellowed and haunting paths and templates for his latest album, Monuments .

"I've recorded at home, in the rehearsal studio, and live," he says. "It's all part of the same process. It's not site specific, it's anywhere and everywhere, letting the sounds feel a way around each other, letting them combine in different ways and phases over time. They're all really excavations; excavation work."

Piecing together his work from different recordings, a new mood emerges from the totality. Though the saxophone is the only instrument present, through its parts and permutations Vince's tracks become reminiscent of the ominously-stacked layers that make up a Lynch score, whilst his performances are like field recordings dense with archeology for the audience to explore.

"Though my music could be construed as ambient, I haven't really played any ambient nights. I'm often billed as something different in the contour of an electronic night, and I'm very happy just to cut myself adrift with no samples or anything at the start of each performance."

Not being so precious about particular tracks has given Vince the freedom to explore improvisation, something he speaks about with passion. With just the bones of his sax riffs as jumping-off points, and a minimal set-up to create short loops and arpeggios, Vince focuses on bringing each live set towards moments of rhythmic intensity.

"I very rarely get a noticeable reaction from the audience," he laughs, "unless I hit the mic and make a kick-drum sound and get a woo! Or after I've built loads of tension and I bring something familiar in, or pitch it down and ride the sub-bass for a while. This is where my love of dance music comes in."

For the moment, this is as close as Ben gets to the club sound of some of his previous pop and dance music projects. Working with experimental musicians Housewives , label-mates Tomaga, and south-east London's legendary wandering post-punk bard Charles Hayward, Vince has focused on creating through limitations and improvisations. Each track on the LP sprawls beyond six minutes like a probe feeling its way round the dark.

"Through playing with Charles and people like that, I've learned more and more about control and freedom. Just using the saxophone I'm very aware of the limitations of my sound," Vince admits, before adding, "but I feel like it's an imposed limitation. It's something that's saved me from the boredom of making computer music, because without a mad tactile set-up, there is so little space in it to improvise. I'm just concerned about making a story at the moment."

I mention to Ben that he and his work put me in mind of the Ouilipo group, a collective of artists, mathematicians and writers working in the 1960s who sought to expand their practices through storytelling and formal limitations. He responds by putting on a beautiful album I've never heard before, Elaine Radigue's Jetsun Mila . She sounds like the saintly Godmother of the modular synth.

He then goes on to to talk about African drumming ensembles, his love of Mica Levi, Arthur Russell—with whom Vince bears a number of striking and endearing resemblances—his successful shows at Café OTO and the Jazz Café last month, and what it was like supporting Japanese psychedelic super-phreak Keiji Haino.

"He does a similar thing, a lot of his records are unedited, sometimes almost live performances and he doesn't see any separation between the two. He's an inspiring musician. He plays like 80 different instruments, indiscriminately, just goes around picking up stuff. He has a spiritual relation with himself and sound."

Through his own work, there's a real sense of making this transcendent relationship readily available to the listener. It's a gift that certainly has its pedigrees in the spiraling ecstatic throes of dance music and the elasticated grooves of Arthur Russell and the rest of the downtown NYC disco-not-disco crowd. But it's Vince's improvisations, each of their unique consciousnesses weaving above the performance, that give us access to a visual and physical mind-space to become lost inside. "Music is a spiritual end in itself, or at least my relationship to it is. I've never really been religious, but in the last few years I've given it a little thought. I think playing music, especially improvising, is definitely is a way of accessing a spiritual state, of being with the earth and of being alive. I think there is definitely a kind of gratitude for just being alive within music…"

At this point he breaks off, and begins frantically searching for something on his computer. It's a field recording of some crickets and grasshoppers made by the composer Jim Wilson, but the audio has been slowed dramatically.

"Mate, mate… this is gonna fucking blow your socks off."

The sound is ethereal, beautiful. Ben compares it to a Gaelic chorus he once heard, with one soloist leading, and then the congregation following in the shape of the melody, improvising their responses. The track is called "God's Chorus of Crickets."

Ben Vince's LP Monuments launches this Sunday 9 th April, 7.30pm, at Lewisham Arthouse, SE14 6PD. He'll also be performing at 'H ow to Become A Cult Leader,' a night platforming artists across all disciplines, this Friday night, 7 th April, 9pm, at the Total Refreshment Centre, N16 7UR.

Tom Glencross is a writer and photographer.